It has only been a week since The Pirate Bay admitted to discreetly running a crypto miner to obtain CPU resources of the visitors to rake in Monero coins. Now, it seems that the trend is becoming popular since according to latest reports two of CBS Corporation’s premium cable network Showtime’s websites Showtime.com and ShowtimeAnytime.com were also caught to be running Coin Hive code to borrow the computer processing power of visitors to perform Monero mining.
Monero is a small cryptocurrency that has emerged as a reliable alternative to Ethereum and Bitcoin. The code that is run by the Showtime websites can run up processor use with the setThrottle value to be set at 0.97, which means the mining JavaScript stays dormant for about 97% of the time visitors are accessing the websites. This is what makes it all the harder to detect.
As of now, there hasn’t been any official statement released by Showtime regarding the appearance of crypto miners on its websites, so there is no clear information about whether the code was installed intentionally by Showtime experimentally or the site was hacked. We believe that it was an experiment conducted by Showtime to raise money, but the possibility of hacking cannot be rejected as well. Regardless of how the code appeared on these websites, it is a fact that using crypto mining JavaScript injections to raise money and use as a substitute of advertising has become an increasingly popular trend nowadays.
Security analyst Troy Mursch identified the use of crypto miners by Showtime websites. Mursch claims that it is quite resentful that CBS has enabled the mining software without any request or notification to its subscribers.around 60% of the CPU capacity of visitors was being used by the mining software the entire time any of these two websites were sitting idle in their browsers. When CBS got a hint of the exposure of its practices, it immediately removed the mining tech from the websites, but Mursch had saved screenshots from the websites before, during and after the miner was run.
This has been ongoing for 7 hours. These scripts are still present on @Showtime's website. No response yet from @sho_help. #hacked #security pic.twitter.com/tuSBhDx9EU
— Bad Packets by Okta (@bad_packets) September 24, 2017
The screenshots saved by Mursch are as follows:
According to Malwarebytes’ Labs’ Jérôme Segura, “there seems to be a trend lately for publishers to monetize their traffic by having their visitors mine for cryptocurrencies while on their site. The idea is that you are accessing content for free and in exchange, your computer (its CPU in particular) will be used for mining purposes.”
It is although a rare practice, but if adopted on a long-term basis it might replace ads for good as ads can be malicious and annoying at times. However, the fact that it hijacks computers for crypto mining deeply concerns for users so if they want to protect themselves, they can install Adblockers having crypto mining blocking power like Adblock Plus. Alternately, they can use a dedicated browser add-on for crypto mining such as the No Coin extension from Google Chrome.
Source: SkensNet, Via: The Register
