A stable Opera 50 came out with protection from hidden mining

A stable Opera 50 came out with protection from hidden mining

PHOTO : Dominique Jaussein

When a user visits a page of such a site, the script starts using the processor's resources at full capacity. All this may be signs that users have become victims of the crypto-currency mining, the so-called crypto-jacking. However, in the case of popular browser Opera, for the first time a developer built in a protection directly into its program.

With the growing popularity of digital money, many owners of web portals began using the Coinhive service for the mining Montero crypto currency in their own guests' browsers. First of all, similar mining is carried out without the knowledge of users, since the production cryptocurrencyncy significantly consumes the resources of the guests' devices.

The developers of the well-known Norwegian browser announced a new functionality that would prevent malicious network intrusion for hidden mining on user machines. Those who prefer to see ads, while they want to remain protected from crypto-junking, can separately activate the newest feature in the settings by clicking No Coin. AdGuard found out that the number of Internet resources using cryptographic junking is increasing every month by 31%.

According to Groot in his personal blog Gwillem Lab, on 2 496 sites (mostly online stores) there is obsolete software with known security vulnerabilities. Some of the sites found directly include the coinhive.js file, others are more hidden and use an iframe pointing to siteverification.online. This site checks the operation of the Apache2 server on Debian systems and has a built-in crypto manager. Some malicious sites disguise themselves as Sucuri Firewall. In order to avoid cryptography, Groot advises to use ad blocker AdBlock, special extension Coin-Hive Blocker for Google Chrome or add the address "127.0.0.1 coin-hive.com coinhive.com" to the Hosts file on your PC.

By the way, on the site Coinhive quite openly offer their services for embedding JavaScript-miner on web pages - anyone can do it. In this case, the developers themselves position their miner as an alternative to advertising and oppose its hidden embedding without warning of users. Last month, the authors of the Coinhive Miner reported on a record simultaneous connection of more than 2.2 million users in the first week of its existence. Total power at the same time was 13.5 megawatt per second, which is about 5% of the entire network Monero.
Mining in the browser. How to protect from it

The new trend began to gain momentum quickly, and the network already had information about the first expansion of the Chrome browser with hidden code that forced the users' computers to crash the Montero cryptocurrency. The SafeBrowse extension used the same Coinhive script.

Specialists of the antivirus company ESET identify the miners hidden in the code of the page as malicious software and classify them as malvertising (malicious advertising).

In truth, Coinhive is by no only service of its kind. There are other sites selling ready-made scripts for mining in the browser. This indicates that such services are in demand.