Chrome Extension Caught Silently Mining CryptoCurrency without Users Knowledge

Cryptocurrency Miners are in the raise starting from last year, more than 500 million computers are mining cryptoCurrency in their browsers without the user’s knowledge and now the chrome extension Archive Poster.

Websites involved in crypto-mining by injecting mining scripts into visitors browsers and most popular among them is Coinhive which offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero Blockchain that can be embedded into other Web sites.

Now even the Chrome extension started mining cryptocurrency, a chrome extension Archive Poster with more than 105,000 users Caught injecting an in-browser cryptocurrency miner.

Archive Poster is an extension used to repost the Tumblr blogs, according to the users review the extension includes the most famous coinhive source code starting from the December.

The extension consists of a hidden Coinhive crypto jacker and it won’t ask any permissions before abusing the user’s CPU resource.

At GBHackers, we discovered one such fake site ( www.1337x.io ) of the very popular torrent sharing site 1337x doing this. The problem is, when you google this site’s name, the first result you get is the fake website’s address. So, we reported this site immediately to Google and the next day, the script was removed from the source code.

The largest torrent search engine, the Pirate Bay, that made CoinHive famous by being caught using it. Last week another Cryptocurrency Miner spotted using chrome version of facebook messenger to mine Cryptocurrency.

“An old team member who was responsible for updating the extension had his Google account compromised,” Essence Labs told PCMag. “Somehow the extension was hijacked to another Google account. In the meantime, we have alerted the users to use a safe version of the extension on a different link.”

Temporary Defense – Archive Poster

Temporary defense is to trash the extension from Chrome which halts the mining process.