“Psss… Friend. Want to rent a set of mining facilities to make a profit on these suckers?” This phrase was overheard on the expanses of DarkNet. So, let’s talk about such a phenomenon as cryptojacking.
Today, a serious deterrent to the cryptocurrency business is the lack of processing power needed to mine bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. So the attackers invented a way to lure processing power from other people’s devices. This practice is called cryptojacking.
🔸 How does Cryptojacking work? You visit a website and while you are there browsing the site, a malware script starts running in the background. These are usually just some basic lines of JavaScript code that will then be used by your computer or smartphone to extract cryptocurrency. You may not even suspect that your device provides private processing power and energy to cryptojackers.
🔸 How to protect yourself from cryptojacking? You can use security software to automatically block cryptocurrency miners in your browser. For example, Malwarebytes automatically blocks CoinHive and other cryptocurrency mining scenarios. There are also free browser extensions such as minerBlock (for Chrome) or No Coin (for Chrome and Firefox).
It is worth noting that cryptocurrency mining in the browser is not always bad. In fact, some people regard legitimate, voluntary mining of cryptocurrency in a browser as an alternative monetisation model, which could potentially replace ads on websites.