The Pirate Bay has turned on the crypto liner for users again, it cannot be disabled

On September 17, Geektimes published the news that The Pirate Bay tested the miner as an alternative to advertising banners on the site. In other words, the administration of the resource decided to change the way of receiving funds for maintaining the site. This was done without warning, no one asked for the consent of the users.



Found a miner only because the computer started to work much slower than usual. “Pirate mining” did not last long, plus users found several ways to disable the crypto liner, which consumed the resources of the computer on which the browser was opened with the tracker page loaded. In the end, the resource removed the code of the Coinhive miner from its pages. But now the code has been added again, and it is no longer possible to disable it.



For the first time, the code was implemented not directly into the page code, but into the advertising code. Many blockers and anti-virus tools were able to disable the script, which was used by site visitors who did not want someone using their computer’s resources. After some time, the administration of The Pirate Bay reported that testing was carried out for a short period of time (24 hours).



By the way, the money received with the help of a miner should bring a good income to The Pirate Bay administration. Experts estimate that if the miner is not turned off, then it will help to earn about $ 12,000 in dollar terms per month. The miner's script itself is “sharpened” under Monero - a cryptocurrency, transactions with which are extremely difficult to track. Perhaps the real amount is more or less than the estimated amount, but it does not matter - the main thing is that the funds are still decent.



Now the miner is configured so that he does not overload system resources, so that users may not suspect anything.



Last week, the CDN-provider Cloudflare temporarily froze the account of another ProxyBunker torrent tracker. The administration of Cloudflare considered a miner malicious, so this decision was made. At the same time, ProxyBunker users have the opportunity to disable the miner - the owners of the resource have provided such an option. But users of The Pirate Bay can not boast of the same.



Interestingly, the creators of the miner Coinhive are dissatisfied with similar ways of earning their customers. The company promised to provide for the possibility of disconnecting the miner on its side, and it is planned to realize this opportunity in such a way that it cannot be hidden / made inactive.



Crypto miners are now for torrent trackers and porn sites a good alternative to donated users (provided that almost no one donates funds voluntarily). Banner advertising + miner can bring good income, provided, of course, that site traffic is high.





According to Adguard, more than 220 large and medium-sized sites - mostly porn resources and torrent trackers, began to be used by miners of various types. Sometimes miners are used on “white” resources. For example, recently Showtime TV channel and the official site of Cristiano Ronaldo got caught up with it.



At the same time, it is difficult to understand whether the code was placed by hackers, or the miner was posted by the official resource team. The latest such site, seen in the use of the miner, was the clone Dropbox uptobox.com, which is among the top 1000 most visited sites rated by Alexa. In a month its audience is about 60 million unique visitors.



The CoinHive team encourages those who use their code on their website to notify users of this. Gradually, antiviruses with ad blockers are starting to block crypto-miner scripts. In this case, usually the user has a choice - to block the miner or allow him to work. The same AdGuard does not block crypto miners if the user does not want this.



Recently, an analytical company published the results of a study on the use of miners on various resources.