Popular chrome extension secretly mining cryptocurrency on your computer

Mining cryptocurrency is another way to earn great amount of money, but the systems end up using a large amount of electricity and it is not so efficient most of the times, but what if you mine on someone else’s computer using their resources. Well this is what a popular Google Chrome extension did.

“Archive Poster” a popular chrome extension was secretly mining Monero coins. With over 100,000 users this extension was using an in-browser crypto miner without its users’ knowledge. Over this issue it received major backlash and so Google removed it from their store, but still a safe variant is available.

Troy Mursch reported to Bleeping Computer that this extension includes of Coinhive cryptojacking code in a JavaScript file present from the following URL: https://c7e935.netlify[.]com/b.js. The report also claims that this hidden cryptojacker has been present on at least four previous updates of the Archive Poster extension – from 4.4.3.994 to 4.4.3.998.

Users started reporting this issue to Google as it kept on using their CPU power without informing them. So Google decided to remove this extension form their store.

Well this is certainly because of rising popularity of cryptocurrencies that they took this unethical step. Mining cryptocurrency for a computer is a very power consuming task and so they used other computers to accomplish the task.

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Source: Gadgets 360, Bleeping Computer.