Alexey Malanov | Security Researcher | Kaspersky Lab | mail me |
In 2018, web miners, applications that run in a user’s browser and mine cryptocurrencies for profit, could have consumed as much as 18.8 gigawatts of electric power, according to our research on the economic and environmental impact of web mining. This makes it comparable to the power consumption rate of Poland and means the environmental impact of web mining is close to 800 tons of CO2 emissions.
Web mining or browser-based crypto-jacking is a threat that many users might be regularly subjected to without being aware. They may only notice if they check a web page source code or notice that certain web resources are overloading their devices when opened.
The impact
Web mining is an alternative method of cryptocurrency mining which uses website visitors to achieve its goal. Website owners convert the capacity of their users’ devices into cryptocurrency while the user’s browser is on or running in the background.
In certain cases however, web pages notify users of their exposure to this scheme and ask for their consent, explaining that web mining is being performed to monetise the web page without showing annoying ads or paid subscriptions.
There are a lot of legal and technical initiatives aimed at minimising the impact of web mining and we can see a significant decrease in activity in 2019.
However, as long as there are economic benefits to web mining there will be attempts to overload the processors of unsuspecting victims. And, perhaps even more importantly, this is a rare type of cyber threat but creates a significant negative environmental footprint.
This means that preventing operations such as these from happening is not only a question of cybersecurity, but also something that indirectly helps to save the environment. This is definitely an unexpected takeaway, but one that is worth remembering when assessing the severity of web mining.
Security solution
This is why we urge everyone to protect themselves with a security solution that checks web pages for the script that initiates web mining and stops it.
To avoid having a personal device used for web mining, we recommend users to:
- Pay attention to your computer’s performance: if your PC experiences lag and freezes, it can be a sign of malicious activity.
- Check if your system gets noticeably hotter – this is a significant sign that the processor is being perused, which is very typical for web miners.
- Start using a reliable security solution like Kaspersky Security Cloud that delivers protection from web miners.
- If you are a business, a dedicated corporate cybersecurity product can help. For example, Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business includes web threat protection that ensures web pages visited by employees don’t contain malicious objects.