This past weekend, the popular torrenting site The Pirate Bay caught some flack for testing out a new system that used visitors’ CPU power to generate cryptocurrency profits for itself. This tactic has been around for years, but the high profile implementation signals that it’s probably time to start blocking this crap. Here’s how it’s done.
RuTracker was told to remove 320,000 illegal torrents to avoid being banned but following a poll on their site, decided to refuse. The refusal has lead to the site being permanently blocked from access in Russia, and if the new law passes, even search engine results would be removed. The bill also targets sites which attempt to circumvent ISP blocks. If you have explorer 8 and you have your internet settings set to automatically delete content after shutting down browser, then all you have to do is shut down your browser, and your search history will be deleted. The internet options are in the control panel usually under network settings. Braden 9 years ago.
The Pirate Bay Added a CPU-Hijacking Bitcoin Miner to Some Pages
File-sharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as…
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First of all, you need to determine if you even want to block sites from using cryptocurrency miners in your browser. You probably do, but maybe you’re feeling open-minded about it. The administrators of The Pirate Bay (TPB) wrote a blog post explaining their reasons for doing it after people freaked out. They explained that they were testing out a new service called Coin Hive on the site that would allow them to mine the cryptocurrency called Monero while users have TPB open in a browser tab. “We really want to get rid of all the ads,” the admins wrote. “But we also need enough money to keep the site running.”
TPB has some notoriously awful advertisements, and due to the site’s illicit nature, those kinds of ads are all it can attract. Some people might be open to allowing a little bit of their CPU power to be used while they browse in exchange for an ad-free experience. But TPB screwed up in two ways: They didn’t tell users about the test in a prominent way, and apparently due to a “typo” in the miner setup, the miner was using almost all of the user’s CPU power instead of the intended 20-30 percent.
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Miners work like a botnet. A user visits a webpage and you might be asked to give permission for the site to use your CPU, or you might not. Cryptocurrencies use a lot of processing power to run a complex hashing algorithm to find a unique string of letters and numbers. Those who do the processing are rewarded for successfully cracking the code. Typically, the older the currency the more time and processing power is necessary to find that unique hash. Mining Bitcoin with a botnet at this point isn’t considered to be worth it. But newer currencies like Monero offer an opportunity for sites as popular as The Pirate Bay to possibly turn a crypto-profit off of its millions of users.
Maybe that sounds good to you. But these miners have also been known to be used by malicious advertisements around the web and on occasion they can also act as trojans.
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If you just want to block miners, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to block the network that The Pirate Bay is using. The bad news is that you’ll need to know the specific URL for other networks.
Coin Hive is attempting to make a reliable mining service that’s simple for webmasters to set up. There are a few ways to block it. The fastest method is to just install No Coin in Chrome. The plug-in was recently put together by a programmer named Rafael Keramidas and for the moment, it only blocks Coin Hive.
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But you may not even need a new plug-in because ad blocking software can do it, too. For AdBlock, you can find instructions for your specific browser and system here. Using Chrome as an example, you’d go to your list of extensions > find AdBlock and click options > click the customize tab at the top > click block an ad by its URL > in the text field that appears enter:
https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js
That’s all there is to it. The benefit of the No Coin plug-in is that it only focuses on cryptocurrency miners. More importantly, if it takes off Keramidas might continue adding other services to block over time. The project is also on GitHub and other programmers might jump in to add additional mining filters in the future. For now, just installing and forgetting about it is a pretty simple solution.
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[Rafael Keramidas via Motherboard]
While googling some errors today I noticed I had the option to use
the pirate bay search
Now I saw a similar question posted here How did piratebay.se search engine get in Chrome as an “other search engine”
But my problem is different.
It only appears when I search what I was searching in the above photo, it doesn't appear for anything else, or at least I haven't found another search combination where it has appeared.
eg
It only appears when I use the below search.
As well, there is no extension in my chrome browser which installs this, it's just there.
Now the obvious answer might be, oh you visited PirateBay at some stage and that's why it's there, But I can guarantee that this system has never once been on the site, the last thing I googled which included the word Pirate was 'Pirate Jokes' which, unfortunately turns up some good results.
I have scanned my system for Malware and Viruses and there's nothing.
So -
- The machine is free of Malware and Viruses
- The machine has never visited The Pirate Bay before
- There's no Chrome Extensions for 'The Prate Bay Search'
- It only appears for certain Syntaxes
Basically my questions are -
- How could that have gotten there
- Is there anything to worry about
- If so, what would you recommend
Thanks in advance
Edit One:
If i try to search using it, it will re-direct me to the piratebay
We block the website so it will never go there, but it could potentially cause issues for a network where Torrent Sites are not blocked.
Edit Two:
So my new question is.
Can this be a vulnerability to a users machine?
If a company or user did not have sites like that blocked and a user searched it accidentally, could they be infected with malware, I'm thinking of a JavaScript exploit or something similar as 90% of users I imagine just click 'Allow' or 'Okay' on pop ups.
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RyanIGRyanIG
1 Answer
This is a Chrome feature.Chrome is suggesting some of the search engines you've used at some point based on keywords in your search query.*
Open chrome://settings/searchEngines to see that The Pirate Bay is there.
* You say that the device has never visited The Pirate Bay before. Did not, or just deleted it from history? I'm not sure whether deleting the history will delete all the other search engines too.
Samuel ShifterovichSamuel Shifterovich