Greg's Corner

Websites may be using your computer to mine for cryptocurrency

Advertising and the internet have a contentious relationship to say the least. While advertising is where the majority of content creators make their money, there are many drawbacks to taking in advertiser money. Many advertising programs, like Google’s Adsense, seem to have arbitrary policies that see some creators penalized while others do not for providing similar content. Not to mention that one only need to look at YouTube’s recent adverting restrictions that users have referred to the as the ‘Adpocalypse’ to see advertisement money can disappear at a moment’s notice. With those dollars disappearing, a number of content creators have turned to cryptocurrency mining.

It was discovered recently that a number of websites owned by television network CBS, had code injected into their websites that ‘borrowed’ processing power from viewers’ computers in order to help mine concurrency for someone. In this instance, it was reported to be the cryptocurrency Moreno. It’s viewed as a more private alternative to the more popular Bitcoin. While the injection of code into CBS’ websites may have been perpetrated by a bad actor, that hasn’t stopped some websites from using such code on unsuspecting users. Mining cryptocurrencies requires massive amounts of computing power, so it should come as no surprise that some less than legitimate websites have begun using this tactic.

Not all hope is lost though. There are ways to protect your computer from having its computing power leeched for the benefit of someone else. Many of the popular browsers have extensions that will block mining code. A number of the most used ad blockers already block the coin code and a search for coin blocker should turn up a few more.