Ad blocker developer AdGuard writes on its blog that more than half a billion PCs are mining crypto coins without the user's consent. The company released a report about the scale and impact of hidden cryptocurrency mining in the browser after it was in the news that some sites make money by abusing the computers of their visitors this way.
AdGuard has added protection against crypto currency mining scripts like CoinHive, Cryptoloot and JSEcoin, and first asks the user whether they actually want to mine or not.
The report states that from the 100,000 most visited websites on the world, 220 websites were using mining scripts. Although the number of sites is relatively low, they have an audience of 500 million users from all over the world, according to Alexa.com.
The number is especially alarming, as the first 'cryptocurrency mining script for the browser' was first released about a month ago. In this month the websites earned about $43,000 without any effort. They just abuse the CPU cycles of their visitors which in return get a higher electricity bill or notice lower performance of their system.
The majority of the 220 websites were in the 'gray zone', as Adguard writes. Websites that mostly offer pirated (porn) movies.
Although the method to generate revenue through crypto coin mining in the browser is relatively new, many antivirus software product and ad blockers have added protection against it. Users that don't want to use those, can also download an extension for their browser like AntiMiner, NoCoin or MinerBlock, that all block these crypto currency mining scripts.
