Recently, several websites have been exposed for embedding code to secretly mine cryptocurrency on a visitor's computer - the latest and highest-profile new entrant in the shady practice is Politifact. With the price of cryptocurrency skyrocketing, the practice is an enticing way to generate revenue for websites (Politifact has since removed the code).
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Surreptitious cryptocurrency miners hide on Politifact and hundreds of other sites
In recent months, several JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miners have appeared. The idea, supposedly, is that instead of showing your visitors ads, you have their CPU run the calculations necessary to mine a currency like Bitcoin. As the administrator, you could control the CPU load and reap any resulting coins. CoinHive is a new business that offers this as a service. The site is far from alone: a study by ad blocker company AdGuard showed that hundreds of sites, most of them on the shady site (porn and torrent sites, for instance) are running CoinHive code, or some other JavaScript-based miner.
