Year 2017 saw sudden rise in cryptocurrency trading. People were not just buying cryptocurrencies, but there were people who invested bin on mining. We website owners also started mining Monero on the browsers of people who visited their websites.
Now a Italian web developer Diego Betto found that hackers were using YouTube ads to mine Monero on people’s browser watching those ads on YouTube. He noticed that his system’s CPU usage suddenly increased while visiting YouTUbe. Later, he found that YouTube ads were infected with CoinHive JavaScript code to mine Monero.
Also see: How to Mine Monero
Coinhive is the website that lets people mine Monero on browser. Many website owners used this to monetize their websites. Hackers also hacked few big websites to inject their mining code and earn quick month. But use of YouTube ads to mine miners is a big news.
YouTube also acknowledged the misuse of its ads but claims that the infected ads were blocked within two hours. YouTube is the second most popular website and mining cryptocurrency on YouTube is really profitable. People visit YouTube frequently and spend hours there. So, the two hours of mining can give a good return.
Opera was the first web browser to add a built-in protection from web miners. CloudFlare has also started blocking users who are using javascript based mining. You can also check if a website secretly mines cryptocurrency. You can also follow these ways to block cryptocurrency mining on your browser. So, you can either use Opera 50 or start using any extension that can keep your browser safe from miners.
Read More: Best Cryptocurrency to Invest in 2018
