Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked People's Laptops to Mine Cryptocurrency
When Stensul CEO Noah Dinkin visited a Starbucks in Buenos Aires recently, he probably didn’t expect to be served some sneaky cryptocurrency miner code along with his coffee. But thanks to the store’s internet provider, that’s exactly what he got.
“Hi Starbucks, did you know that your in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires forces a 10 second delay when you first connect to the wifi so it can mine bitcoin using a customer's laptop?” Dinkin tweeted on December 2. “Feels a little off-brand.” Dinkin wrote that Bitcoin was the digital currency being mined, but CoinHive, the company that provided the code for the miner, only works with Monero, a competing coin.
On December 11, Starbucks responded to Dinkin’s tweet, acknowledging the issue and announcing that it’s been resolved. Visitors to the Buenos Aires location where Dinkin noticed the mining code will no longer have their computers sneakily hijacked, it would seem.
“As soon as we were alerted of the situation in this specific store last week, we took swift action to ensure our internet provider resolved the issue and made the changes needed in order to ensure our customers could use Wi-Fi in our store safely,” the official Starbucks account tweeted to Dinkin.