With the degree of interest that virtual currencies have aroused, it was expected that some portals and hackers would take advantage of our hardware to undermine cryptocurrencies. If you want to navigate safely and without seeing how the use of your CPU is triggered, we show you a series of instructions to
block the mining of cryptocurrencies in the browser
.
Cryptocurrencies are in vogue, a madness that has started in the digital world of currency with Bitcoin, but that other cryptocurrencies have followed, such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, etc.
The mining of cryptocurrencies, arouses the interest of hackers and webmasters.
These currencies have all in common that can be obtained through mining, which is nothing more than a job to which we submit our hardware in order to obtain fractions of these currencies.
Hackers and webmasters, aware of the benefits that cryptocurrency mining can bring them, have gotten to work by integrating mining systems into their web pages. These
work transparently for the user, just by visiting a web address, they can use our resources to perform mining tasks
.
The best known example is Coinhive, a tool that uses our browser's Javascript engine to mine cryptocurrencies. Many websites use this script to undermine Monero.
How to block cryptocurrency mining scripts in the browser.
All of the above may sound very alarming, but luckily we already have the tools to block these unwanted programs.
In principle they are not dangerous programs, but they hijack our resources
(CPU, RAM, etc.)
without our authorization.
In the case of portable devices that work with a battery, the greater the consumption of resources, the shorter the battery life, so in this case it is interesting to know
how to block the cryptocurrency mining
.
To block mining scripts, we have the following
extensions
:
-
MinerBlock
: available for Chrome and Opera browsers on the project website:
https://github.com/xd4rker/MinerBlock
. MinerBlock uses two techniques to block miners. This extension uses a blacklist to block scripts and dangerous addresses, but it also analyzes the behavior of the scripts and if it detects that it makes extensive use of our resources, it stops the script immediately.
-
No Coin
: This extension is available for Chrome, Opera and FireFox on its official website:
https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin
. Use the usual blacklist technique of scripts and URLs in a plain text file
blacklist.txt
. No Coin is a less effective extension than MinerBlock, but at the moment it is one of the few extensions to block miners that works in FireFox.
Other options to avoid cryptocurrency mining in our browsers.
While Google Chrome developers are planning how to fight this technique directly from the browser, Opera developers have already implemented anti-mining features in the Opera 50 Beta development version. We imagine that FireFox will also do the same in the not too distant future, but for now we will have to wait.
Our second option is to block the URLs in our
ad blocker
ourselves or we can also add these URLs to the Windows hosts file to block them. In the latter case, the developer Ruvelro has facilitated the task with a small
.bat
file that we can
find in GitHub
(Halt-and-Block-Mining)
and that it will be enough to
execute it with administrator permissions
.
