The Pirate Bay Website Runs a Cryptocurrency Miner
A few hours ago a cryptocurrency miner appeared on The Pirate Bay website, using the computer resources of visitors to mine Monero coins. The operators of The Pirate Bay are testing it as a new way to generate revenue, but many users aren't happy. Four years ago many popular torrent sites added an option to donate via Bitcoin. The Pirate Bay was one of the first to jump on board and still lists its address on the website. While there’s nothing wrong with using Bitcoin as a donation tool, adding a Javascript cryptocurrency miner to a site is of a totally different order. A few hours ago many Pirate Bay users began noticing that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. Upon closer inspection, this spike appears to have been caused by a Bitcoin miner embedded on the site. The code in question is tucked away in the site’s footer and uses a miner provided by Coinhive. This service offers site owners the option to convert the ...