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A lust for gold cryptocurreny is a powerful intoxicant. And that is precisely the problem for YouTube right now.
Several bad actors have managed to get adspace on the platform that allowed them to hijack visitors CPUs and electricity to mine cryptocurrency. The first warning came last Tuesday when, despite the fact that the method used isn’t a virus per se, the ads triggered several users’ anitvirus software.
Hey @avast_antivirus seems that you are blocking crypto miners (#coinhive) in @YouTube #ads
Thank you 🙂https://t.co/p2JjwnQyxz— Diego Betto (@diegobetto) January 25, 2018
The ads use JavaScript to mine Monero. Nine times out of ten, the ads are using publicly available code from Coinhive, a controversial platform that allows users to profit from the use of other’s computers. The rest use a private script that cuts the middleman (Coinhive) out. Both versions, however, are programmed to use 80% of visitor’s CPU. Which is pretty rank.
While the abusive ads have been stopped, the period of time in which they were in effect is fuzzy. But this is likely to continue to be a problem, as it’s merely the latest such incident. And, it’d really help if Google got its shit together on this, because these little incidents keep happening.
Source: Ars Technica
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