PIRATE MINERS - Cryptojacking your CPU to mine CRYPTO - Is your PC under ATTACK? -how to stop it-

As cryptocurrencies price and acceptance skyrockets in the past couple of years so has peoples greed to get their hands on some easy money.

Over the past couple of months there has been a lot of fuss about pirate mining / cryptojacking sites that use a malicious javascript code to harness CPU power of their visitors to mine cryptocurrencies that are easy to mine like Monero. This would be ok if the website clearly stated doing so but almost all sites will never say so unless they are caught.
As seen in The Pirate Bay incident recently.

Piratebay and many other websites have been caught using a Javascript code to lowkey mine cryptocurrency using visitors CPU.
The code is very simple and easy to be implemented in a website through Coinhive

After being caught The Pirate Bay wanted to minimize damage and stated:

"We really want to get rid of all the ads," the operators said. "But we also need enough money to keep the site running."

Since then users of the site are have been divided into two groups.
Those who don't mind The Pirate Bay doing this because they are getting value from the site and want to give back and support it

As one user said

I don’t really mind spending extra CPU if it helps tpb.

And another

...and those who are mad because The Pirate Bay wasn't straight forward about it and only confessed when they have been caught using the script

Fun fact: The official website of Real Madrid superstar Cristiano Ronaldo was caught using CoinHive code recently. As if he doesn't have enough cash already lol. GO KIKI!

Given that the site doesn't have to pay for people's electricity and hardware, and just milks them of crypto-cash, let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations for Pirate Bay. Assuming:

• The average Pirate Bay user's browser running Codehive's script is capable of mining Monero at 30 hashes per second. A decent Intel Core i7 can do 90 per second in a browser. Your humble hack's Core i5 in a laptop can do 30. Let's just go for 30.
• The site attracts 200 million users a day, apparently, and half of those don't have some kind of script blocking in their browser, ie, there are about 100 million users crunching away at 30H/s for some period during the day.
• Let's assume they each spend just a minute on a mining page on the site, on average, a day. Some will stay on a mining page for a while, some will leave after a few seconds. That's, let's see, 180 billion hashes cracked a day in total, on average, or 2,083,333 a second over the day.
• According to this online calculator, that would cough up $123k a month – again, based on these almost random estimates we've come up with. We're willing to be way off the mark.
  

  Read more Pirate Bay digs itself a new hole: Mining alt-coin in slurper browsers

It's yet unknown to what extent this "Cryptojacking" is happening and the full list of site that use this code is not yet available but as AdGuard stated

the pirate mining pandemic seems to be much larger as AdGuard have suggested that over 220 sites are actively, and mostly secretly, doing it, affecting over half-a-billion users a month.

This is just a piece of the pie, who knows how many sites are out there using the code to mine crypto for their personal profit.

Is your computer being used to mine crypto?

Do you visit malicious websites? Have you noticed that your PC is running slower than usual? Is it using more CPU or producing more heat than usual?

This can all be signs that your PC is being used to mine crypto and if you have noticed any of them you should protect yourself and block them from doing so. Unless you want to spend more electricity to make someone a profit of course.

Some ways to Prevent Your Browser Being Hijacked for Cryptocurrency Mining

No Coin Extension
Google’s Chrome web browser has a extension which you can easily install to prevent Pirate mining. No Coin is an open-source extension that FossBytes.com calls a “reliable and safe way to control how a website is interacting with your web browser.” No Coin will search any website for possible mining activity and alert you if any such processing is occurring. The extension will allow you to block or whitelist those websites as you prefer.

MinerBlock Extension
Similar to No Coin, minerBlock is an extension for the Chrome browser which is also open-source and which prevents Pirate mining in your browser. Like No Coin, minerBlock will alert you when you travel to a website that may be using your CPU power to mine crypto.

Block Domains With Ad Blocker
Web browser extensions used to block advertisements can also help you to block domains for other reasons too, including sites that are looking to steal your CPU power. AdBlock is a popular extension which allows you to block an ad or website by inputting a particular URL. The downside with this method of blocking mining is that you’ll have to be able to tell whether the site is participating in this scheme on your own. Check your computer’s activity monitor to look for spikes in CPU usage upon visiting certain websites.

NoScript Extension
If you use Firefox to browse the web, you can block unauthorized CPU mining with a JavaScript-blocker extension such as NoScript.Bad thing about using an extension like this is that it may affect harmless websites which happen to use JavaScript as well. It’s possible that you would find that other websites simply won’t work, as NoScript is too wide-ranging in its efforts to block Java usage.

Read more here

Be careful and stay on the safe side. Use any of the above mentioned extensions to prevent your CPU from being Hijacked for somone else's personal profit.

What is your opinion on this? Would you mind a website using your CPU to mine? Is this malicious practice immoral and how can we put an end to this?
Drop a comment below because I would really want like to see what you think.

I'm not here to ask you for upvotes but a resteem would be nice to spread the awareness.

As always have a great day and STEEM ON.
Cheers!