Now even YouTube isn't safe from cryptocurrency miners

[Murasaki]

Don't you just love when websites resort to mining cryptocurrency using your own CPU cycles? Then you will be pleased to know that they're on YouTube aswell.

 

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/now-even-youtube-serves-ads-with-cpu-draining-cryptocurrency-miners/

Quote

YouTube was recently caught displaying ads that covertly leach off visitors' CPUs and electricity to generate digital currency on behalf of anonymous attackers, it was widely reported.

Word of the abusive ads started no later than Tuesday, as people took to social media sites to complain their antivirus programs were detecting cryptocurrency mining code when they visited YouTube. The warnings came even when people changed the browser they were using, and the warnings seemed to be limited to times when users were on YouTube.

Quote

The ads contain JavaScript that mines the digital coin known as Monero. In nine out of 10 cases, the ads will use publicly available JavaScript provided by Coinhive, a cryptocurrency-mining service that's controversial because it allows subscribers to profit by surreptitiously using other people's computers. The remaining 10 percent of the time, the YouTube ads use private mining JavaScript that saves the attackers the 30 percent cut Coinhive takes. Both scripts are programmed to consume 80 percent of a visitor's CPU, leaving just barely enough resources for it to function.

 

And we thought obtrusive and annoying ads were something to complain about. This new "method" is becoming widespread across many websites and most aren't even aware of these scripts sucking off their processors in the background.

Computers are one thing but on mobile devices it drains your battery extremely quick. Equip your hardware with adblockers and phones with 5000mAh+ batteries, the future is gonna be exausting.

[AbdulESL]

This is becoming insane..

[JuztBe]

I thought youtube is actually checking what ads they are showing. This is pretty bad. 

Even more reasons to get ad blocker. 

[PCGuy_5960]

Sorry YouTubers, but AdBlock FTW

[Drak3]

7 minutes ago, JuztBe said:

I thought youtube is actually checking what ads they are showing. This is pretty bad. 

Even more reasons to get ad blocker. 

Google will host any ad so long as someone is paying them. They do not care.

[suicidalfranco]

pi-hole

^^^^^^

best investment i've ever made for my home network

[DragonTamer1]

I'm not sure if adblocker will stop it, I have adblock as well as a script blocker and lately the script blocker has been flagging something on youtube but I don't know what. If I see it pop up again I will take a screen shot of the blocked url and share.

[Misanthrope]

- "Miss Wojcicki! There's another controversy...No, not fuckboys this time. Pirates are using ads to mine what shall we do?"

- "Susan: Say you're working on the situation...do something token like promise to review some of the ad servers...Oh and don't forget to fuck over the little channels some more"

- "Aye aye mam!"

[AresKrieger]

You poor poor people. you still have ads on youtube, I haven't seen those since 2012

[CTR640]

Noscript and uBlock Origin, I love both of you.

[themctipers]

websites that force your cpu to mine w/o your permission should be illegal 

[crystal6tak]

Just so you guys know, this isn't limited to ads. If the website owner themselves decided to implement this (like what happened to pirate bay), adblock won't help. I personally use minerblock in case a website does this.

[potoooooooo]

You're a dumbass if you're not using some sort of ad blocker or script blocker at this point

[suicidalfranco]

brace yourselves

adpocalypse 3.0 is coming

 

now you'll need 10k subs and be able to gather 50k hours of playtime every 6 months to be eligible for monetisation

[Zodiark1593]

Thia royally screws over usability for those using cpu decode. And the usual battery drain complaints.

[Revan654]

3 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Sorry YouTubers, but AdBlock FTW

Don't you mean UBlock

 

Adblock is not blocking half the ads on the web ever since FireFox 57 update.

[Cookybiscuit]

I didn't realise there were people who still aren't using an ad blocker.

[Energycore]

17 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

brace yourselves

adpocalypse 3.0 is coming

 

now you'll need 10k subs and be able to gather 50k hours of playtime every 6 months to be eligible for monetisation

Google should be able to just run a scan for mining code before they display an ad. What I'm not sure about is if they care enough to do so, or anything that takes them effort and man-hours.

[Revan654]

16 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

brace yourselves

adpocalypse 3.0 is coming

 

now you'll need 10k subs and be able to gather 50k hours of playtime every 6 months to be eligible for monetisation

 

I would look for a Network rather then adsense or whatever youtube uses now.

 

Network I'm on requirements are pretty low compared to other networks and Youtube system.

[Deli]

No wonder why my PC runs very sluggish when opening Youtube recently. Even though I already have adblock installed. Oh oh oh, this is insane.

[Zodiark1593]

11 minutes ago, Deli said:

No wonder why my PC runs very sluggish when opening Youtube recently. Even though I already adblock installed. Oh oh oh, this is insane.

I use an Intel Atom system out and about, with no VP9 hardware decode (Bay Trail). Mining at the same time would absolutely choke the poor thing.

[Nicnac]

It's crazy how much energy people put in writing code for a few crypto bucks... If only all this energy could be used for something actually useful...

[Thermosman]

Official statement from Google from the article

Quote

Mining cryptocurrency through ads is a relatively new form of abuse that violates our policies and one that we’ve been monitoring actively. We enforce our policies through a multi-layered detection system across our platforms which we update as new threats emerge. In this case, the ads were blocked in less than two hours and the malicious actors were quickly removed from our platforms.

[Murasaki]

1 hour ago, Deli said:

No wonder why my PC runs very sluggish when opening Youtube recently. Even though I already adblock installed. Oh oh oh, this is insane.

If you're using AdBlock, you should switch to uBlock instead. It works much better in many ways.

[Deli]

4 minutes ago, ModuleLFS said:

If you're using AdBlock, you should switch to uBlock instead. It works much better in many ways.

Will try it this evening. Thanks for the advice.