There’s been some talk about this on social media for a while, I also reported about it in my weekly podcast a few times too, well now it’s time to elaborate on it.
So, what is it?
It’s a term that describes an act of hijacking someone else’s CPU to mine cryptocurrencies. Ever since the first reports started circulating about The Pirate Bay doing it, Cryptojacking has become a “thing” in the past 6 months and the trend is spreading out.
A number of apps started appearing in 2017 making it easier than ever to mine crypto with phones, tablets or laptops. Coinhive seems to be the tool that came out first and gave birth to the trend but since then we saw a great deal of phone apps or Chrome extensions popping up and the trend keeps growing. The extensions will soon be banned according to Google. The key issue here is the lack of transparency and the intrusive manner this is being executed upon.
In its nature, Cryptojacking is profitable and is on its way to becoming a popular trick for blogs and websites to generate revenue, some use it as an alternative to the old-school ads (banners, pop-ups and in-between) which are way too spammy, messy and in effect, not very profitable compared to results reported from crypto mining.
I call it a trend because a few video streaming sites and the abovementioned file sharing network The Pirate Bay have allegedly been “cryptojacking” their users’ computers in this way, as has the free WiFi provider in a Starbucks cafe in Argentina. Users may object to this, especially when it slows down their computers. The Pirate Bay claims they only tested the option briefly, but that was enough to inspire many others to follow suit. Only a few weeks later, Pirate Bay has also turned on the mining again. Thier team previously said that they were testing the miner to see if it can replace ads. While there is some real revenue potential, for now, it’s running in addition to the regular banners. It’s unclear whether the current mining period is another test or if it will run permanently from now on but given how hard it is for most companies to make money from online advertising, this might be something we have to get used to….(I hope not).
How does it work?
In-browser cryptojacking uses JavaScript on a web page to mine for cryptocurrencies.
JavaScript runs on just about every website you visit, so the JavaScript code responsible for in-browser mining doesn’t…
