According to a report published by Adguard, some websites had been making money by mining cryptocurrencies in their users’ browsers since the disclosure about The Pirate Bay.
Bitcoin or Ethereum are some examples of cryptocurrencies that can be mined and collected through computation. When a website that is mining cryptocurrency is visited, there is an unusual surge in the CPU usage, which can show to be profitable for website owners because when a huge number of computers donates their powers, the mining is successful in earning profits.
JSEcoin and CoinHive are the two most popular and common libraries that are used to mine cryptocurrency using user’s PCs.
According to Adguard:
We found 220 sites that launch mining when a user opens their main page, with an aggregated audience of 500 million people. These people live all over the world; there are sites with users from the USA, China, South American and European countries, Russia, India, Iran… and the list goes on. 220 sites may not seem like a lot. But CoinHive was launched less than one month ago, on the 14th of September.
Adguard said that the websites made a joint profit at over US $43,000. Yes, it’s not millions, but this money has been made in three weeks at almost zero cost.
