Shocking: COMSATS University Website is Using Your PC to Mine Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency has become increasingly popular during the past year or so. These decentralized virtual coins cannot be regulated by governments or other financial authorities.

Owing to their increased popularity, several website owners are using their visitor’s CPU and resources to mine cryptocurrency.

This practice isn’t new, however, this is the first time COMSATS university’s website has been spotted loading crypto-mining scripts.

COMSATS and Crypto-mining

If you visit the website without enabling an adblocker, you will notice a sudden spike in your CPU usage to 100%.

To check if this is true, just disable your adblocker or any other blocking extension, open your task manager (ctrl+alt+delete/ctrl+shift+Esc on Windows 7/10) and click on the performance tab.

If your CPU usage increases suddenly, this means a mining script is being run on your browser by the website.


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Here is what we are talking about. There are no other tabs or applications being run in the background. Only comsats website is running on the browser, you can clearly see the CPU usage of the computer has hit 100%.

CPU Usage during Comsats Website Visit

 

We are not sure whether COMSATS’ website administration knows about this or not. However, using the visitors’ computer CPU power without their consent to mine coins for your own benefit is not acceptable.

How to Block Mining Scripts

You can use a bunch of extensions to block these kind of scripts from loading in your browser. In addition, you can also follow these tips to protect yourself:

  • Block domains in Adblocker.
  • Get MinerBlock extension in Google Chrome.
  • Get No Coin extension for Chrome.
  • For Firefox, use a NoScript extension to block mining scripts.
  • Manually block coin mining domains.
  • Use Opera browser’s built-in No Coin protection.

Know of any other local websites that use mining scripts? Sound off in the comments below.


  • Hmm, doesn’t look like they are mining to me. My CPU usage is peaked at 33% after enabling scripts on the page, and even Whoismining. com gives negative results.

    False flag?

  • i think its fake news you should remove into the internal computer. it has been visible due to installed any malicious type software

  • Admin , are you gone nuts?
    How can a single browser tab/session consume 100% cpu?
    Prove your claim by showing respective process consumption.

  • Lol!! newsflash it’s your crap Microsoft edge browser that is eating up all the resources. Who even uses that. Also restart your laptop, it is having problems running Windows.

  • Previously the web developer had hidden links to his 4dult sites in the footer of this university site. The fault lies with the computer illiterate older generation whose job it is to provide oversight in matters like these. I’m referring to the people who work in administration at comsats. They don’t use their own site so how could they know about issues like these? It’s a common problem among Pakistani companies and organizations.

  • I am a software developer and I also checked now. I had already opened many tabs among which some were from my work, facebook, google drive, site monitoring etc. but my CPU usage was 4 to 6%. But as I opened COMSATS site CPU usage went up to 56%, 60% and then coming back and forth.
    I think it may be possible.

      • Shabash. Ap k akhlaq ko salam he. Apko agr meri bat se ikhtilaf he to ap achy tareeqy se uska izhar kr sakty thy. Lekn tarbiat he aisi hui ho to, es me apka koi qasoor ni he.
        I feel sorry for you brother. You are pitiable.


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