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.

ALSO READ

Hackers Are Selling $534 Million of Stolen Cryptocurrency

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%.

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.