Pirate Bay uses visitors’ CPUs for mining digital currency

Adam Westlake - Sep 17, 2017, 8:00 am CDT
Pirate Bay uses visitors’ CPUs for mining digital currency

Torrent and piracy websites are in a difficult situation when it comes to raising money. The more they grow in popularity, the bigger the costs of operation get, but they can’t exactly depend on advertising revenue to survive. While donations via Bitcoin have been the preferred option for some time now, it appears The Pirate Bay may be moving to a more direct method for generating funds: using visitor’s CPU cycles to mine digital currency.

Visitors to The Pirate Bay recently discovered JavaScript code being used that revealed a cryptocurrency miner was in place on the torrent website. This code makes use of visitor’s processors to mine Monero digital coins. It’s not a constant occurrence on the website, but users began digging after they noticed significant spikes in CPU usage while on certain pages.

Shortly after this was reported by TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay confirmed to the site that it was using the miner as part of a 24-hour test to see if it could be used as a permanent way to generate revenue, allowing them to replace ads altogether. No other details were revealed, but The Pirate Bay said they might have more information in the future.

As you’d expect, visitors to the site weren’t place with having their computers’ resources hijacked without permission. It was quickly determined that the miner can be blocked by disabling JavaScript in the browser settings or using ad blockers. Should The Pirate Bay make the miner a permanent feature, they run the risk of upsetting a lot of their users if they don’t disclose it before it kicks in.

SOURCE TorrentFreak

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