Image Sources: Pixabay Pixabay

This past weekend, the popular torrenting site The Pirate Bay caught some flack for testing out a new system that used visitors’ CPU power to generate cryptocurrency profits for itself. This tactic has been around for years, but the high profile implementation signals that it’s probably time to start blocking this crap. Here’s how it’s done.




First of all, you need to determine if you even want to block sites from using cryptocurrency miners in your browser. You probably do, but maybe you’re feeling open-minded about it. The administrators of The Pirate Bay (TPB) wrote a blog post explaining their reasons for doing it after people freaked out. They explained that they were testing out a new service called Coin Hive on the site that would allow them to mine the cryptocurrency called Monero while users have TPB open in a browser tab. “We really want to get rid of all the ads,” the admins wrote. “But we also need enough money to keep the site running.”




TPB has some notoriously awful advertisements, and due to the site’s illicit nature, those kinds of ads are all it can attract. Some people might be open to allowing a little bit of their CPU power to be used while they browse in exchange for an ad-free experience. But TPB screwed up in two ways: They didn’t tell users about the test in a prominent way, and apparently due to a “typo” in the miner setup, the miner was using almost all of the user’s CPU power instead of the intended 20-30 percent.

Miners work like a botnet. A user visits a webpage and you might be asked to give permission for the site to use your CPU, or you might not. Cryptocurrencies use a lot of processing power to run a complex hashing algorithm to find a unique string of letters and numbers. Those who do the processing are rewarded for successfully cracking the code. Typically, the older the currency the more time and processing power is necessary to find that unique hash. Mining Bitcoin with a botnet at this point isn’t considered to be worth it. But newer currencies like Monero offer an opportunity for sites as popular as The Pirate Bay to possibly turn a crypto-profit off of its millions of users.

Maybe that sounds good to you. But these miners have also been known to be used by malicious advertisements around the web and on occasion they can also act as trojans.

If you just want to block miners, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to block the network that The Pirate Bay is using. The bad news is that you’ll need to know the specific URL for other networks.


Coin Hive is attempting to make a reliable mining service that’s simple for webmasters to set up. There are a few ways to block it. The fastest method is to just install No Coin in Chrome. The plug-in was recently put together by a programmer named Rafael Keramidas and for the moment, it only blocks Coin Hive.

But you may not even need a new plug-in because ad blocking software can do it, too. For AdBlock, you can find instructions for your specific browser and system here. Using Chrome as an example, you’d go to your list of extensions > find AdBlock and click options > click the customize tab at the top > click block an ad by its URL > in the text field that appears enter:

https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js

That’s all there is to it. The benefit of the No Coin plug-in is that it only focuses on cryptocurrency miners. More importantly, if it takes off Keramidas might continue adding other services to block over time. The project is also on GitHub and other programmers might jump in to add additional mining filters in the future. For now, just installing and forgetting about it is a pretty simple solution.


[Rafael Keramidas via Motherboard]