ICT Security-Sécurité PC et Internet

As Ars Technica reports, YouTube has been spotted pushing ads onto users.

That, in itself, isn't newsworthy of course. But these ads are surreptitiously stealing resources from visiting computers to mine for cryptocurrencies:

On Friday, researchers with antivirus provider Trend Micro said the ads helped drive a more than three-fold spike in Web miner detections. They said the attackers behind the ads were abusing Google's DoubleClick ad platform to display them to YouTube visitors in select countries, including Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain.

The ads contain JavaScript that mines the digital coin known as Monero. In nine out of 10 cases, the ads will use publicly available JavaScript provided by Coinhive, a cryptocurrency-mining service that's controversial because it allows subscribers to profit by surreptitiously using other people's computers. The remaining 10 percent of the time, the YouTube ads use private mining JavaScript that saves the attackers the 30 percent cut Coinhive takes. Both scripts are programmed to consume 80 percent of a visitor's CPU, leaving just barely enough resources for it to function.

You should run an ad blocker when you surf the web.

==================================================

Not just because ads are invariably ugly and ruin the user experience. Not just because you don't want ads tracking your online behaviour. Not just because ads slow down your online experience and gobble up your bandwidth. Not just because ads can infect your computer with malware, or be secretly sapping your computer resources by mining for cryptocurrencies in the background.

==================================================

But because even Google, one of the world's largest advertising companies (with its own considerable security prowess), seems to be incapable of guaranteeing a stream of safe ads. What hope for the other advertising networks if Google can't get it right?

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=Coinhive

https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=crypto-currency

https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=cryptojacking

Stealth cryptocurrency mining in one’s browser, without the user’s permission, is one of our least-favorite trends of the past six months. While there were always questions about whether cryptocurrency mining in-browser could serve as an alternate revenue stream for websites, there was at least an idea that some kind of alternate funding system might emerge — hopefully putting an end to the eternal cycle of invasive ads driving users to deploy ad blockers, which then drives websites to adopt more invasive ads.

But instead of an informed approach in which end users consented to such mining, we’ve seen stealth operations popping up everywhere that steal CPU cycles from users, particularly if more than one crypto mining malware is running simultaneously. While most of these plugins are written to only put a light load on user’s CPUs, that’s only if the miner is running in a single browser instance, and only if it’s running on a single site. Our tests back in 2017 showed that using different browsers can defeat this dubious attempt to sandbox the performance impact. And, of course, even running one site will still drain battery life more quickly than having the CPU properly idled.

It’s like someone figured out how to monetize the awful Flash ads everyone used to hate for eating CPU cycles. A true win-win! And now it’s even hitting YouTube.

TrendMicro has released an updated report, showing a sharp rise in ads served by Google’s DoubleClick service being infested with mining software.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=Coinhive

https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=crypto-currency

https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=cryptojacking