The Pirate Bay took the first step, and upon understanding its potential, a part of the web soon followed suit. Background cryptomining is gaining traction, and the number of users generating coins for someone else without consent keeps growing. The folks at AdGuard presented a brief study reporting an average participation of 500 million computers per month. The number of sites with cryptominers in the Top 100 of Alexa is still low, but in just three weeks they already earned 43 thousand dollars in profits at an almost negligible cost.
The Pirate Bay has reactivated its cryptominer based on the Coinhive service, and for now there is no opt-out option, so users must use some blocking solution if they disagree. What initially was a simple test has now become a permanent income mechanism. However, The Pirate Bay did something more: it set the wheels in motion. Adopting the advantages of Coinhive is very simple, and we can already find several clones, among which JSECoin, CryptoLoot, and MineMyTraffic stand out. With a larger number of services comes a notable expansion of background cryptomining, and the people at AdGuard have data to share.
The scale of the problem
Taking the 100,000 most popular sites on Alexa as a starting point, AdGuard determined that there is a monthly average of 500 million users mining without having given permission. The exact number of sites in that Top 100K amounts to 220, only 0.22 percent. It seems irrelevant, but we cannot say the same about the money. AdGuard calculates that in a three-week period, the combined earnings of those 220 portals reach 43 thousand dollars, a sum obtained at a cost close to zero (cryptomining services keep a minimal commission).
An ethical dilemma
What kind of sites are we talking about? BitTorrent indexes, sites dedicated to streaming, file exchange, adult content, and news are the main categories. More than 18 percent of affected users are in the United States, followed by India, Russia, and Brazil in fourth place. Once again, the whole conflict boils down to an ethical issue. Collective cryptomining is a legitimate technology that can help cover the (increasingly large) hosting costs that some sites face, as long as it is applied responsibly. Multiple antivirus programs already report miners as malware, and Cloudflare confirmed it will suspend accounts of those who do not report the inclusion of a miner in their code. To be continued...
Official site: AdGuard blog
