Users weren’t warned that this was happening, and visitors reportedly discovered the mining software utilized up to 80% of a visiting user’s CPU cycles. Such workers can also notably drain battery life for guests on mobile devices. And as of this reporting, Showtime has been completely reluctant to confirm that this occurred, much less explain how the code arrived. The company has refused to respond to various requests for comment from a myriad of websites, News included. The code developed in the evening of September 23 and had passed by the next Monday morning.
It seems almost unlikely that administrators or developers at Showtime imagined it would be a good idea to hijack the browsers of possible customers to mine cryptocurrency, motivating many to believe that Showtime’s servers were likely chopped by somebody looking to covertly make a little extra money:
“The JavaScript, which developed on the sites at the start of the weekend and disappeared by Monday, sits between HTML comment tags that appear to be an addition from web analytics biz New Relic. Again, it is questionable that an analytics company would voluntarily stash coin-mining scripts onto its customers’ pages, so the code must have originated from another source or was injected by convicts who had compromised Showtime’s systems.”
That said, it’s not absurd that Showtime was running an experiment. Cryptocurrency miners have been making headlines in current weeks after The Pirate Bay was caught also covertly using Coinhive to hijack visitor browsers to make extra bank. Coinhive only just started September 14, advertising itself as a creative alternative to the traditional advertising model. But after users over at the Pirate Bay subreddit created the practice and began to complain, the website was made to pull the software from its code and published a relatively a comment:
“As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner. This is alone a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need scarcely money to keep the site running.”
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