Crypto Miners – The Silent CPU Killer of 2017 [source: checkpoint]

25 Oct 2017

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The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, is a massive online source for digital content– movies, games and software—and is among the top 100 most popular websites globally, according to Alexa. No stranger to controversy for its role in illegal downloads, a few weeks ago it was discovered that The Pirate Bay operators have begun using the website users’ computer resources to mine the Monero cryptocurrency, using a hidden JavaScript-based miner called CoinHive.

Until recently, websites that provide free services earned almost all their revenue through advertisements. Is the Pirate Bay example signaling that cryptocurrency mining may soon take over as the main revenue source?

How does the rising popularity of cryptocurrency miners affect the cyber security landscape? In which cases is it a legitimate tool, and in which is it considered malware? In this report, we will answer these questions.

For more, click here.