Over 500 Million People Are Unknowingly Mining Cryptos - Kitco News

(Kitco News) - More than 500 million computers are tricked into mining cryptocurrencies and one of them could be yours, according to a new research.

Ad blocking firm AdGuard analyzed 100,000 popular websites over a period of three weeks and found that 220 of them were secretly using crypto-mining scripts, which were triggered when users went on their home page.

This means that about half a billion users that visited these websites ended up running mining software without even knowing it.

“We found 220 sites that launch mining when a user opens their main page, with an aggregated audience of 500 million people. These people live all over the world; there are sites with users from the USA, China, South American and European countries, Russia, India, Iran… and the list goes on,” the report published last week said.

The U.S. was impacted the most by this, with 18.7% of websites running the cryptocurrency mining scripts, according to the research.

Profit made by these websites stood at $43,000, AdGuard said, noting that even though the number seems low, it is still very significant considering the timeframe. “This money has been made in three weeks at almost zero cost.”

The websites that employ such tactics are usually either pirate video sites, Torrent sites or pornography websites, specified AdGuard’s report.

They usually use codes such as CoinHive and JSEcoin, which are currently “the most popular solutions for browser mining in use,” according to the research.

These codes are known to take over computer’s central processing unit (CPU) and dedicate a part of it to digital currency mining, which slows down the overall processing power.

“220 sites may not seem like a lot,” the report said. “But CoinHive was launched less than one month ago on September 14. The growth has been extremely rapid: from nearly zero to 2.2 percent of Alexa’s top 100,000 websites.”

This is not the first research that shows evidence of stealth cryptocurrency mining by websites.

About a month ago, it was uncovered that the Pirate Bay website used such mining software without any consent from users that visited the website.