According to new research published by the Chinese security firm 360 Netlab, 241 out of the top 100,000 websites by Alexa traffic rank contain code that creates a type of malware which makes the site visitor’s computer mine cryptocurrencies.
360 Netlab was generous enough to share that its new insights found out that 49 percent of these sites were porn-related. The firm kindly provided a list of the sites hijacking unsuspecting visitors’ computer hardware to mine digital coins. The offending websites included cut-rate porn sites that “only somebody trying to watch porn on the Internet for the first time and just Googled ‘porn’ would visit,” as Motherboard, a multi-platform multimedia publication, reported.
The report also showed that 9.6 percent of those websites were “normal,” 7.5 percent were “fraud,” while 7.3 percent were related to advertising. Mining malwares, mainly, existed on the sites where people tend to spend a great deal of time, such as personal blogs, video hosting services, online games, etc.
The so-called in-browser cryptocurrency mining via a torrent site has been gaining momentum recently; it has the capacity to slow down the computer and eat away its resources, which made the newly discovered trend of particular interest to cyber security researchers.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
