Adblock Plus Releases Cryptocurrency Miner Hijack Protection Filter

Megalith

Megalith

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Adblock Plus can now protect your computer from being hijacked to mine cryptocurrency: the team has released a filter that users can add to their Adblock Plus browser extension in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Android. Add the extension, and your device will no longer be used to quietly mine Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.

Over the weekend, The Pirate Bay users noticed that a cryptocurrency miner had appeared on the site and was using visitors’ computers to mine Monero. This isn’t the first time a site has explored cryptocurrency mining as an alternative source of revenue, but The Pirate Bay is one of the top 100 sites in the world, so the news understandably made waves.
 
The funny thing is that depending on the percentage of resources consumed, I'd rather have a thread or two of my computer's cores devoted to mining than all sorts of pop-up, pop-under, and auto-playing video ads.
 
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Well, stay off Pirate Bay.
Teenyman45 said:
The funny thing is that depending on the percentage of resources consumed, I'd rather have a thread or two of my computer's cores devoted to mining than all sorts of pop-up, pop-under, and auto-playing video ads.
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For God sake yes, no popups, popovers, autoplays or dynamic refresh wasting my bandwidth. i'm trying to read.
 
gigaxtreme1 said:
Well, stay off Pirate Bay.

For God sake yes, no popups, popovers, autoplays or dynamic refresh wasting my bandwidth. i'm trying to read.
Click to expand...

It's not just that, but many animated ads (especially from the flash days) would take my GPUs out of standby desktop mode to full activity spikes, the net power change by my GPUs rendering the ad at the equivalent of hundreds, if not thousands, of FPS is likely greater than the power consumed by mining on one or two threads.
 
I went to a site on purpose that was flagged to have the miner, and low and behold I have 100% on all eight cpu cores. Enabled blocking on ABP, refresh the page - all gone. Things like this are going to result in the complete downfall of ads on the net.

*edit* Nope I just opened it again and its still pegging my cpu, it says abp is enabled for the site, and it's not in my whitelist...

*edit 2* Nope I'm an idiot. ABP isn't doing this, it just has the capability to. I added in the line required in the article, and now it seems to actually work.
 
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arnemetis said:
I went to a site on purpose that was flagged to have the miner, and low and behold I have 100% on all eight cpu cores. Enabled blocking on ABP, refresh the page - all gone. Things like this are going to result in the complete downfall of ads on the net.
Click to expand...
Which website did you use to test this?
 
For Chrome, am I supposed to add the filter like this: ||coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js or just like this coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js
 
Another crime related cryptocurrency news. Ban them already.
 
Couldnt add this in on firefox..

coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js.

clicked on add filter subscription,

then clicked on, add a different subscription. Then went down the part where it says filter list location and copy pasted this coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js.

and it says Filter list location is neither a valid URL nor a valid file name.

any help for a firefox user.. cheers
 
Can you force Adblock Plus to work with the latest Firefox versions? It's saying the plugin isn't compatible with Nightly (58.x).
 
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