Are you a frequent visitor of torrent sites? You know, for downloading “Ubuntu’ on a regular basis. Well, if so, your PC might be being used for cryptomining without your consent. And it can severely impact your PC’s performance.
For those who don’t know, Cryptocurrency is a form of digital currency, like Bitcoin. It can be mined by the use of powerful PC and is a highly valued form of transaction on the internet. Torrent sites have recently started using the PCs of users visiting their sites in order to mine for Cryptocurrency online, the forefront of which is Pirate Bay. There’s also no way of disabling this from happening, though using an Adblock might help to some extent. Whenever a user visits the torrent website, the site runs a Javascript based “miner” that uses the user’s CPU power to mine for Monero coins, which like Bitcoin, is a form of Cryptocurrency.
You can see whether this is happening by noticing a spike in CPU usage or PC slowdowns when you are on the torrent site. Here’s a sample image:
Some of the mining scripts run by torrent sites have been detected to be malware, and can put your PC at risk. The main issue here is that some of the torrent sites are running the mining software without asking the user. In some cases the “miner” runs in the form of an ad on the site, and could be blocked by using an AdBlocker. However, some of these ads do find ways to get around it, and can install malicious software on to your system.
So yeah, next time you’re looking to download “Linux”, might as well use the official website.
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