It all began with ThePirateBay, which conducted a 24-hour mining test. ThePirateBay mined Monero from site users without their knowledge. The same thing had been done by Showtime. This has sparked fury among users of these sites, as well as worries and anxieties regarding the vulnerability of individuals who visit and stay on the sites for an extended period of time. However, there are a few precautions you may take to protect yourself.
Checklist – Is your computer secretly mining?
- The performance is slower than usual: The first clue that you have been “cryptojacked” (a phrase used to characterize this hidden mining activity) is that your computer’s performance has been slower than usual. Given that you’re the one who uses it all the time, you should be aware of this.
- The computer is overheating: Overheating is another technique to recognize that the processor utilization is having an effect. As we said in the preceding paragraph, if the activity hasn’t altered yet the computer continues to overheat, and it’s an indication that it’s being used for mining.
- The electricity bill is higher than usual: Mining is an activity that needs a lot of power and high-performance equipment. As a result, if your power bill is larger than normal but you haven’t purchased any new home appliances, it might be a clue that you’ve been cheated.
- You’ve been visiting suspicious websites: It happens to everyone, and it isn’t always related to pornographic material. In the first half of this post, we discussed how websites get visitors to click by displaying attractive photographs or article titles, which leads to you being cryptojacked.
A Story of Advertising Management
It should be emphasized that ThePirateBay’s argument was that they regarded bulk mining as an alternative to advertising networks. The PirateBay is in what is known as “a gray area.” They enable illicit downloading while claiming that they do not host any files. It would be an abuse of the platform to store pirated materials. This defense, however, is useless to advertising firms. They don’t want to be identified with the negative connotation of illicit downloading.
By weakening its users, even if it meant ruining their system, ThePirateBay discovered an alternative to recompense through advertising. As a reminder, our experiment with the Google Chrome plugin “Monero Miner” caused our computer to heat up to 93° in a matter of seconds.
Check Your Cpu Usage to Fight Against These New “malwares”
If mining for a third party at the expense of your computer does not appeal to you, there is a quick solution to ensure that this is not the case.
Launch the resource manager. If you’re using Windows, right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager,” then select the “performance” tab.
In normal use, your graph should be relatively “linear”. This is not the case when you mine:
If you find yourself in the second circumstance while browsing a website, there is an issue, and one of the first things to check is whether it is connected to your internet connection. The simplest method is to set your computer in “airplane mode” and watch the graph evolve.
Most mining applications will use your GPU, but not as frequently or as fiercely as they will use your CPU. If you know how your computer works and how effective particular components are in different scenarios, you may launch Task Manager on Windows and examine the percentage of current GPU use. If you’re not playing a video game, watching high-definition video, or operating other GPU-intensive operations, the percentage using a dedicated GPU should be rather low.
Currently, bulk mining is carried out via javascript code, and most ad blockers can guard against it. You can, for example, install Adblock, which will, sadly, deprive us of ad money.
What About Ethics in All of That?
For this section, we shall just cite one of the Internet’s great masters. Not Benjamin Bayart, the great magician of the Internet privacy choice, but Korben, with whom we completely agree.
So, at the risk of being whipped with furious bits by people who have just read the title and the first three paragraphs of this post, this monetization approach deserves our attention, even if it still needs refinement and integration with more transparency.
What to do if someone is using your computer to mine without your consent?
As soon as you discover any of the above-mentioned symptoms, you should totally reinstall the system. This is the only method to preserve your freedom indefinitely. After then, be mindful of whatever websites you visit and avoid clicking on advertisements. It is always dangerous.
Can an anti-virus protect me from secret mining?
Furthermore, because of the criteria, such a program has for accessing your system, running Windows Defender or another effective anti-virus will often recognize mining applications as Trojans, even if it is not technically a virus but rather another type of potentially harmful software. You may do a full system scan or scan a specific suspected file or folder.
