Hundreds of BitTorrent tracker & streaming sites mine cryptocurrency new report shows

With the value of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum, going through the roof, a new report by Pixalate (a player in programmatic marketing and online advertising) finds that 5,442 websites have installed a Coinhive JavaScript.

Coinhive secretly uses visiting computer CPUs to mine for the cryptocurrency Monero, which was worth $191.16, as of December 1.

Cryptocurrency mining involves using your computer to help perform the computationally intensive task of maintaining the global blockchain “ledger” that records all cryptocurrency transactions—in return for very small rewards of cryptocoin.

This is not the first time that websites have incorporated the Coinhive code to mine Monero cryptocurrency using a visitor’s processing power—both the Pirate Bay torrent tracking site and the Showtime streaming site were caught doing it in September.

But now we’re talking over 5,000 websites, not just two.

Pixalate says that the list of “cryptojacking” websites that are using the Coinhive code includes 13 of the top 1,000 websites and 25 of the top 5,000 sites, as ranked by Alexa.

My own examination of the complete list shows that in general terms, a lot of the sites offer streaming multimedia content.

Fully 37.65 percent (2,049) are websites using the .com domain. Second place goes to 312 .net websites (5.73 percent). Third place goes to 209 .ru websites—the same number as have a .co domain, which is assigned to Colombia.

Taking from people who want something for nothing

A truism of grifting is that the easiest people to steal from are thieves. Many of the websites looking to make a little extra coin at the expense of their users are offering something for nothing and often something illegal, at that.

Most of the domain names are undecipherable to me—either alphanumeric salad, or in languages I cannot translate. But 582 website names fall into four unmistakable categories: streaming sites offering mainstream movies, music, pornography and animation (379), cryptocoin sites (127), BitTorrent tracker sites (47) and web proxy sites,which are often used to help mask the use of the first and third category of websites (34).

The additional virtue of streaming and proxy sites for cryptocurrency mining is how they tend to capture a user’s computers for hours at a time. As I understand it cryptocurrency mining offers a very low return on a very large investment of time and computing power.

What it can cost unsuspecting users who run afoul of one of these websites is device performance and lots of electricity—smartphones have poor enough battery life when watching video without the added drain of cryptomining.

Along with the preponderance of streaming websites, another significant correlation on Pixalate’s list are free Google Blogger websites with “blogspot” in their name—there are 989 of these (18.17 percent).

Of the other well-known free blogging platforms, there are 29 Tumblr sites and only 3 identifiable WordPress sites: ncerthelp4u.wоrdpress.cоm, donоttrackme.wordpress.cоm, tbfpblоg.wordpress.cоm. (I have changed the coding of the URLs so they do not link to the actual sites.)

People wishing to avoid this needless drain on their computing resources should investigate getting a adblocker or tracker blocker that can also block JavaScript code execution, such a uBlock Origin, which I’ve been using for several years.