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A recent crawl of more than 175 million websites found active cryptocurrency mining scripts on 23,872 unique domains. That’s about 1 in every 7,300 sites.

Researchers at Ahrefs identified the top websites running mining malware and ordered them by most organic search traffic. The list was published on April 3.

torrentz-2.eu: 3,434,018 est. visits/month whatismyipaddress.com: 3,047,785 est. visits/month zamunda.net: 2,039,719 est. visits/month rutracker-net.ru: 1,440,599 est. visits/month ilcorsaronero.info: 1,073,419 est. visits/month myegy.tv: 918,394 est. visits/month cinecalidad.org: 783,140 est. visits/month freebitco.in: 652,149 est. visits/month dl-xvideos.com: 643,710 est. visits/month seriesypelis24.com: 536,810 est. visits/month

It now appears that a number of these sites have already taken measures to remove the malware.

How to Detect and Prevent Cryptojacking

So, how can you tell if a site is slowing you down and stealing your precious CPU power? One great way is to use Wappalyzer, a handy tool used by Ahrefs that can detect various types of technologies deployed on websites, including 14 of the most popular mining scripts like Coinhive, Crypto-Loot, Cloudcoins, Coinlab, deepMiner and Monerominer.

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To prevent sites from stealing your computing power, Ahrefs recommends installing browser extensions like minerBlock or No Coin. These plugins specifically block crypto mining malware scripts from running on the sites you visit.

Cryptojacking Scheme Hits Major Ad Network

One of the world’s biggest websites was just caught mining cryptocurrency and unwittingly stealing CPU power from its visitors.

Hackers found a way to inject the aforementioned Coinhive malware miner script into an advertisement on the AOL ad network, which was displayed on MSN.com. The hijacking allowed the cyber thieves to leech CPU power from users who visited MSN.com from around March 24 – 27.

Researchers at Trend Micro say they discovered the malicious mining right away. They then notified AOL of the issue, which acted quickly to eliminate the malware.

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