Re:“An on-page advert was mining bitcoin in my browser”
by ringaroundthetx on Tuesday August 29, 2017 @12:47PM
(#15125599)
It does happen commonly.
There was an entire mining botnet operating for weeks using the same CIA exploit that the Wannacry attackers used. It made a lot more than Wannacry did.
Wannacry's ameteurish and public ways led to patches that both exposed the existence of and killed the botnet.
While I doubt mining bitcoin is going to be worth the hassle currently, other currencies might be, other tasks might be (generating rainbow tables for hash attacks?), and if it is bitcoin maybe that algorithm was just picked as a test for the delivery mechanism.
As JS JiT compilers get better and other tech that might help number-crunching becomes commonly available (webassembly? does webGL allow useful access to GPU processing power?) this sort of thing might become common too.
For people doubting the idea for ROI reasons: if the time to code the mechanism isn't time you would have otherwise paid for, and the delivery network isn't one you run but one you've managed to secret your code into by surreptitious means, then the investment is practically zero and any return is a profit. Heck, for some he intellectual challenge and/or willy-waving potential might be profit enough!
Of course, without seeing the code in question I would say it is far more likely that this is just a really badly coded animated advert or advert cycling code, chewing CPU with unneeded DOM changes & redraws and eating 40Mb of bandwidth constantly reloading content for animation frames that could be cached in a better design. The link to crypto-currencies just because the user had a bitcoin related advert on-screen at the time is, while possible, quite a distant conclusion to jump to IMO.