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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
What is cryptojacking?You know Carjacking? The unfortunate situation when someone steals your car while you are waiting for a traffic light to turn green, and then uses it to rob a convenience store? Cryptojacking is the digital version of it — it’s when the hacker steals your computer’s resources and uses them to harvest cryptocurrency.Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Monero are obtained through mining, a CPU intensive operation that consists of hashing (a cryptographic primitive). Mining is only a viable business if the cost of the computing power and electricity required to operate and cool down your systems is significantly lower than the monetary gain you get from mining. So, if you’re mining through someone else’s computers, you won’t have any costs and you’ll get all the profit.© Bitcoin is just one of the cryptocurrencies hackers mine. Photo by Andre FrancoisTo get the free ride, hackers modify websites and online ads to include JavaScript code that runs in the browser of anyone that is viewing the website or the ad. And that JavaScript mines for cryptocurrency while the unsuspecting victim continues browsing the web. Now the hacker is using the computing power from every visitor of your website, dutifully mining cryptocurrency for him/her. For free.There is a second method that hackers use to deliver cryptojacking attacks: convincing the victim to install malicious code on their computer, using what looks like a legitimate email or popup that calls for some action. However, it is harder to achieve a scale effect this way since you would need to infect a large number of computers.One attack, multiple victimsThere are two types of victims when a site is abused for cryptojacking: the person viewing the modified site and the site owner.Victims that browse a website that includes JavaScript mining code will only notice a
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