Perhaps in a twist of irony, popular magnet/torrenting site thepiratebay.se (TPB) has been discovered to hijack its visitors' CPU cycles and cause 100% spikes while visiting the site, due to a sneaky cryptocurrency mining script, embedded in the website's HTML.

An administrator and "supermod" on the PirateBay Forum, Sid is far from impressed, as noted from the TPB forums:

That really is serious, so hopefully we can get some action on it quickly. And perhaps get some attention for the uploading and commenting bugs while they're at it.

While visitors might be looking to grab a recent film or a totally legit Linux distro, Sid offers the following advice for anyone concerned about browsing TPB:

Until it is fixed (and I would expect it to be fixed sooner rather than later) noscript will block it from running, as will disabling javascript. Blocking/disabling javascript will compromise site functionality in several ways: - scrolling back though pages of comments won't work

- posting comments won't be possible

- viewing the file list won't work

The website for the offending javascript leads to here, with its makers giving this as an advice on their site:

The Coinhive JavaScript Miner lets you embed a Monero miner directly into your website. The miner itself does not come with a UI – it's your responsibility to tell your users what's going on and to provide stats on mined hashes. While it's possible to run the miner without informing your users, we strongly advise against it. You know this. Long term goodwill of your users is much more important than any short term profits.

TorrentFreak reached out to TPB and was told that "the miner is being tested for a short period (~24 hours) as a new way to generate revenue." And further noted that, if the test is successful it may go toward entirely replacing ads.

That seems cool and all, but if a test is generating 100% spikes of CPU usage, one has to wonder how useful it's going to be over standard ads.

Source: Suprbay (TPB) via TorrentFreak & Reddit