CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers
 

Who placed the JavaScript code on two primetime dot-coms? So far, it's a mystery

The websites of US telly giant CBS's Showtime contained JavaScript that secretly commandeered viewers' web browsers over the weekend to mine cryptocurrency.

The flagship Showtime.com and its instant-access ShowtimeAnytime.com sibling silently pulled in code that caused browsers to blow spare processor time calculating new Monero coins ? a privacy-focused alternative to the ever-popular Bitcoin. The hidden software typically consumed as much as 60 per cent of CPU capacity on computers visiting the sites.

The scripts were written by Code Hive, a legit outfit that provides JavaScript to website owners: webmasters add the code to their pages so that they can earn slivers of cash from each visitor as an alternative to serving adverts to generate revenue. Over time, money mined by the Code-Hive-hosted scripts adds up and is transferred from Coin Hive to the site's administrators. One Monero coin, 1 XMR, is worth about $92 right now.

However, it's extremely unlikely that a large corporation like CBS would smuggle such a piece of mining code onto its dot-coms ? especially since it charges subscribers to watch the hit TV shows online ? suggesting someone hacked the websites' source code to insert the mining JavaScript and make a quick buck.

The JavaScript, which appeared on the sites at the start of the weekend and vanished by Monday, sits between HTML comment tags that appear to be an insert from web analytics biz New Relic. Again, it is unlikely that an analytics company would deliberately stash coin-mining scripts onto its customers' pages, so the code must have come from another source ? or was injected by miscreants who had compromised Showtime's systems.

Here's a screenshot of the code on showtime.com, seen by El Reg before it was removed. The mining script was loaded early on the page, we note.

Continued https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/0...mining_script/

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The Pirate Bay are doing this. They say it's either this or Ads. Most people seem to prefer to have their CPU mined.
Personally I blame Relic.

crazy but not unreasonable

If only there were a way to make a website with maybe WordPress and a monero user mining plugin and import millions of videos from maybe porn sites.. hmmmmm

Just because your site has millions of videos, imported or not doesn't mean you get any real visitors.

Getting a few thousand visitors daily just from organic SE traffic is easy.

Here is a screenshot of the post view count of a site https://yomilfs.com I just created and have imported only 42,000 videos so far.

https://tubesitesforsale.com/wp-cont...screenshot.png

All the traffic is 100% from search engines. I have done zero marketing for this site. It's not even a month old.

This isn't even a special case. A year ago, I had a new site (a few weeks old) get about 10k traffic daily with about 50k videos imported from Tube Ace with no marketing efforts.

Looks interesting. Have you tried the Montero plugin?

I am testing now :)

When I look at the idea I think about the following scenario :

I think the above scenario would result in criminal charges of fraud, theft and conspiracy of
all parties associated with the device.

For that reason, I think putting code in a browser that uses an excess of a surfer's cpu resources for my own personal gain with no benefit to the surfer is probably the dumbest business plan ever.

But hey, that's just my opinion.

:2 cents:

If you state in the Terms of Service, why not?

https://www.google.de/search?dcr=0&b...r+pr otection

And https://www.ophtek.com/detect-bitcoi...re-on-your-pc/

Interesting concept