SafeBrowse Chrome Extension Mines Cryptocurrency Using Your CPU Power

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Last week, we learnt about The Pirate Bay’s ongoing attempts to use your processor power to mine Monero digital coins. According to the reports, the website was testing the waters for about 24 hours as a future source of income.

Now, it’s being reported by gHacks that a popular Chrome extension named SafeBrowse has been found running a crytpo-mining module in the background. The mining activity keeps running in the background when the browser is running and the extension is enabled.

If you’ve installed the latest updated version of this extension, you might be seeing an increased CPU usage when Chrome web browser is running. The extension makes connections to coin-hive.com. It’s worth noting that The Pirate Bay was also using a miner from Coinhive.

In the latest development, SafeBrowse has been removed from Chrome Web Store. Prior to that, it had about 150,000 users.

So, if you’re having SafeBrowse installed in your web browser, remove it. As it’s no more available in Chrome Web Store, it won’t getting further updates to fix this issue.

It’s also worth noting that Google does a pretty poor job, as compared to smaller counterparts like Mozilla, when it comes to reviewing the extensions.

While this Chrome extension was mining Monero crypto coins without user notifications, it was installed via a legitimate path. It’s possible that in future, crypto mining extensions could also be installed using a malware attack.