Pirate Bay's secret tracker hijacks users' CPU to mine crytpocurrency

[bsaambl]

Frequent visitors to popular torrent site The Pirate Bay are up in arms after the site secretly added a feature to the site that sapped users' CPU resources to mine cryptocurrency.

While file-sharing websites and other shady corners of the web are always risky places to visit, some of the biggest ones have earned a reputation as relatively safe. While the currency-mining script — which TPB apparently implemented as part of a push to find a new source of income — doesn't pose much of a risk to the site's visitors, hijacking your users' processors to make money for yourself without telling them is not a great look.

The software is provided by a service called Coinhive, and lets websites grab spare CPU cycles from anyone viewing their pages and use them to mine Monero, a Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency which has been around since 2014. According to Torrent Freak the miner was throttled low and only appeared on certain TPB pages, but its impact to the speed of a visitor's computer was immediately noticeable.

Of course users could easily block Coinhive's script as well, with a plugin like NoScript or ScriptBlock, which could be why TPB chose to conduct its "test" without informing visitors.

Regardless, users on the TPB forums and subreddit were almost uniformly irate. Ignoring the irony of pirates being upset that someone had taken something from them without asking, the episode could impact TPB's relatively good standing on the internet going forward.

For its part, Coinhive does not condone its software being used surreptitiously. As reported by BetaNews, its documentation advises:

"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."