VANCOUVER — Anyone casually surfing the internet at home can be deployed as an unwittingly productive member of a hacker's workforce, a practice known as "cryptojacking" that is on the rise.
Internet sleuths have discovered malicious code on the websites of several major companies — including Canada's Loblaw Companies Ltd. — left by cryptojackers looking to break into computers and commandeer their processing power for cryptocurrency mining.
Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are digital "coins" created by groups of computers — known as miners — that work together to solve mathematical puzzles that verify transactions. The more puzzles they solve, the more currency they earn. The exercise is hugely taxing on a computer's processing power and the electricity it requires is expensive.
