Here's How You Could Be A Pawn In The Cryptocurrency Game

Maybe you’re a skeptic, or maybe you want in but don’t know how.

But while you fail to benefit from the bitcoin boom, you may be an unwitting instrument in another’s cryptocurrency work.

Cryptocurrency miners have been hijacking consumer central processing units to steal computational power for the data-heavy process, ultimately accelerating device wear, slowing performance and draining battery life.

Here are three portals through which you may be mining.

Websites

As an experimental alternative to ad revenue, The Pirate Bay embedded its site with CoinHive JavaScript to mine Monero with visitor CPU power. The streaming platforms of CBS Corporation CBS’s Showtime were found to exploit visitors with similar coding.

Other well-trafficked sites have been unaware intermediaries in the mining process.

Politifact.com found its cloud-based server penetrated and a power-exhausting mining script embedded in its code. Google Analytics has also been compromised, along with more than 500 WordPress, Magento, Joomla and Drupal sites. AdGuard found 220 websites in the Alexa top 100,000 list that cater to more than 500 million aggregate visitors that were affected.

Apps

At least 27 Android apps have tapped into mobile CPUs for Monero mining. Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG has since removed three of the offending apps, which had as many as 50,000 downloads off Google Play.

SMS Texting

Some scammers have sent SMS messages luring recipients to click links to claim fictitious bitcoins. The URLs actually invite hackers to infect mobile devices with bitcoin-mining malware.

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