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A guy in a group recently posted that he noticed a malware alert that TechJuice(techjuice.pk)  the famous tech website is mining cryptocurrency in browser.

 How it can affect my CPU power ?
and can you verify if TechJuice is actually mining cryptocurrency through our browsers ?

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Small world eh , few hours back, I also encountered a similar post , i wasn't familiar with techjuice.pk , so I just opened it after seeing the domain authedmine.com as it was a new domain for me . Browser based mining got famous few months back when Pirate Bay was caught mining .As you can see in the link , I am pretty much OK with the browser based mining when it ensures that I will not be shown any pop ups/under. It gets unethical when its being done without user consent.

TechJuice Mining Cryptocurrency on your Machine 

YES, TechJuice.pk was caught mining Cryptocurrency (monero to be precise) on their website without consent of website visitors and has been doing it for a week now
Mining Script was present on homepage along with every other single page of the blog, TechJuice was using a monero mining Javascript provided by CoinHive , which was gunned down recently by various Adblocking applications.
Authedmine.com the script being used by TechJuice is another product of Coinhive , which adds two options to give some legitimacy to browser based mining, following are few points from coinhive documentation :
  • Coinhive says that the web based miner will always ask the visitor "opt-in" and if user allows mining will start. No mining without user permission
  • Once a user opts in they will need to re-authorize the miner after 24 hours
  • On change of IP of the visitor the miner will need the visitor to opt-in again.
While opening TechJuice.pk and browsing to various pages, no one was greeted with an opt-in (notice of consent) , below is how an opt-in overlay looks like :
No box was shown to any user, a mistake ?

Since When TechJuice is mining Crypto off my Machine ?

They say nothing is hidden on internet, No Mining code was discovered on 7th Dec 2017 but it was visible since 14th Dec 2017 till today. Got tired to look further because 6 days of Mining without any notice or disclaimer is a very horrible thing to do.

What TechJuice did about this?

First of all they took the Miner down , the code is NO MORE , the same way they placed it "without mentioning it " , high levels of ethics. Lets have some fun with their funny explanation
  • Correct for Over a Week
  • No User Permissions
  • No Click Required (clickjacking - coinhive , a two liner could do that, intentional ?)
  • Miner code was placed even on pages with "Google Adsense"
  • Miner code was placed on every SINGLE PAGE OF THE WEBSITE
  • Oh so the miner wasn't running? well 13.1% GPU usage when I open your blog ? wow that must be one rendering-intense blog

 How it can affect my CPU power ?

Answer to your question : it will slow down your machine a bit, personally I have no disliking for browser based miners, being into crypto and mining I prefer how cryptocurrency is getting the fame but It is highly unethical to put up a js miner without user consent or notice


 

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