YouTube Ads Affected by Malicious Crypto Mining Script

Mining cryptocurrencies at the expense of other people’s resources, even without their information, is not a smart way to make money, but it is very popular among hackers looking to maintain a passive income stream. is becoming increasingly popular. Last year, popular torrent site ThePirateBay was discovered stealing bandwidth from visitors’ CPUs, and several WordPress-based e-commerce sites were subsequently found to be hosting the cryptojacking script CoinHive. This problem became clear.

Now, the issue appears to have made its way into the mainstream, using YouTube as a breeding ground for pranks. Ars Technica found a wave of users complaining that their antivirus software was interfering with their YouTube experience. As it turned out, the antivirus apps deployed by these users identified the YouTube ad as a malicious CoinHive script used to mine cryptocurrencies without the user’s information .

@avast_antivirus, @YouTube #ads seems to be blocking cryptocurrency miners ( #coinhive )
Thank you 🙂 https://t.co/p2JjwnQyxz

— Diego Betto (@diegobetto) January 25, 2018

https://twitter.com/Mystic_Ervo/status/956237422391709696

Trend Micro researchers saw a threefold increase in detections of mining scripts after drawing online advertisements within the suspect’s circle. The hackers behind this rampage were found to be abusing Google’s DoubleClick ad network to target select countries including Japan, Taiwan, France, Spain, and Italy, a blog post noted. I am. Trend Micro has discovered two different mining JavaScripts based on CoinHive that extract up to 80% of the CPU power from the attacked machine to mine Monero.

Google said the malicious YouTube ad was contained ” within two hours ,” but the Trend Micro report and social media posts said the ads containing the mining scripts lasted for as long as a week . It is impossible to determine how much was stolen by hackers. The script also displayed an unmistakable fake ad encouraging visitors to download an antivirus program.

Illegal cryptocurrency mining has become a serious problem that drains users’ computing power and power, and the trend is only growing as users become more cautious about which online ads to avoid. . Opera recently took a hard look at this issue by adding a blocker for cryptojacking scripts to its desktop and mobile browsers.