Bitcoin mining pool bot net definition

However, the idea was once again revived in December by a group of MIT students in a project called Tidbit—ostensibly touted as an alternative way for website owners to raise revenue. According to one early adopter, the revenue generated by his particular site was far lower than the revenue generated from ads.

In fairness to Coinhive, it recommends being transparent with site visitors and that website owners notify users of the mining that will be taking place and, better still, offer users a way to opt in. The first high-profile site to start using Coinhive mining was The Pirate Bay torrent website. The Pirate Bay has had a checkered history and, being a highly trafficked site global ranking with million visitors in the last six months , has been looking for alternative ways to monetize its considerable traffic.

Its initial attempts at browser mining were quickly spotted by users and they were not too happy about it. At least in the case of The Pirate Bay, this was a case of the site's owners making a decision to use Coinhive. The Pirate Bay's initial attempts at browser mining were quickly spotted by users and they were not too happy about it. One of the Showtime sites affected was its content streaming site which has high traffic and user sessions are lengthy as visitors stay on the site while content is streaming.

Showtime is a premium-based service so it would seem strange that users are made to pay twice for content. The scripts were promptly removed after they were discovered, suggesting that they were planted there maliciously. Reports of many other sites using the Coinhive mining scripts soon followed. Over the Thanksgiving holiday in the U. As with Showtime, LiveHelpNow is already a legitimate revenue-generating business and there's no obvious reason as to why it would risk user confidence to earn a few extra bucks from users.

So the most likely scenario is that the server was compromised either by an outsider, or even an insider. There are many reasons why browser-based mining is back with a vengeance.

Unlike in previous failed attempts, recent developments in the cryptocurrency and threat landscapes have made this a much more viable activity. Let's have a look at some of these factors in more detail:. Privacy is important if you want to mine coins maliciously, in order to ensure others cannot easily follow the money trail back to you.

Monero, which came to the market in , can offer a high level of transaction privacy. Unlike with most other cryptocurrencies that use public transparent blockchains where transaction addresses can be easily viewed by anyone, Monero does things differently. By default, everything is private, including the amount in a transaction, who sent it, and who received it. There is an option with which wallet owners can selectively reveal some information via what's called a view key , but this is not a feature that cyber criminals are likely to want to use.

As mentioned earlier, Coinhive provides a very neat and easy-to-use package for people to get involved in Monero mining. All you have to do is add a few lines of script to your website code. You don't have to make website visitors download and install executable files. The Pirate Bay was soon followed by another high-profile site—this time Coinhive's miner was found on two of Showtime's websites.

With browser-based mining, the cost of mining is borne mostly by the website visitors through hardware wear and tear as well as energy costs.

Scale is achieved by using high-traffic sites with sticky content. Coinhive currently pays 0. The user would have to spend 3, seconds on the site, or roughly 55 minutes, in order to achieve a million hashes.

However, if you can get 3, users to spend approximately one second each on the site it would achieve a similar result. Even under optimal conditions, the amount of hashes produced in each instance will be small, but when it comes to distributed computing power, it's all about scale and every little bit adds up.

As we noted earlier, the value of mining rewards are not great, at least not initially. To get a better understanding, we need to look at the profitability of this activity over the longer term and take in the macroeconomic picture to get a true sense of the reward.

The value of cryptocurrencies like Monero is going up dramatically. Under these circumstances where the price of Monero can go up substantially in dollar terms over a relatively short time, mining Monero can become an attractive proposition.

A small amount of Monero mined today could potentially be worth a great deal more in a matter of months conversely it could also drop significantly depending on the health of the overall cryptocurrency economy.

Mirroring the rising interest and price of cryptocurrency, we have also seen a big jump in our detections of both file- and browser-based cryptocurrency mining activity in recent months. Malicious cryptocurrency mining isn't just confined to desktop computers and servers. Always-connected mobile devices are also a growing target. We have even seen growth in coin mining on mobile phones in recent years. In , we discovered 26 different Android apps that were mining cryptocurrencies. So far in we have found 35, which is around a 34 percent increase.

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In return, they are awarded a certain number of Bitcoins per block. The block chain prevents attempts to spend a Bitcoin more than once -- otherwise the digital currency could be counterfeited by copy and paste. Originally, Bitcoin mining was conducted on the CPU s of individual computers, with more cores and greater speed resulting in more profitability.

After that, the system became dominated by multi- graphics card systems, then field-programmable gate arrays FPGAs and finally application-specific integrated circuits ASICs , in the attempt to find more hashes with less electrical power usage.

Due to this constant escalation, it has become hard for prospective new miners to start. This adjustable difficulty is an intentional mechanism created to prevent inflation. To get around that problem, individuals often work in mining pools. Bitcoin generally started with individuals and small organizations mining.

At that time, start-up could be enabled by a single high-end gaming system. Now, however, larger mining organizations might spend tens of thousands on one high-performance, specialized computer. In the malware world, one of the more prevalent current threats is mining botnet infections, in which user systems mine for Bitcoin without the owners' knowledge and funds are channeled to the botnet master.

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A smart contract, also known as a cryptocontract, is a computer program that directly controls the transfer of digital currencies