A cryptojacking JavaScript web page uses your computer to mine for cryptocurrencies.
More importantly...
You don't need to be tricked into installing cryptojacking JavaScript, because it doesn't need to be installed.
Simply stated:
You don't need to download anything more than the web page with cryptojacking JavaScript, because JavaScript is already the world's most ubiquitous computing runtime.
Let's take a closer look...
What does the code look like?
I navigated to a site that does cryptojacking and tracked down the JavaScript code that performs the cryptomining.
Here's the source code:
The code snippet:
- Loads Coinhive's JavaScript library.
- Tells Coinhive which Monero account to give the mining credit.
- Starts the miner.
Ok, what's Coinhive?
Coinhive offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero blockchain.
The basic idea is to offer alternatives to online advertising. Instead of showing ads to customers, leverage their devices to mine cryptocurrencies to "pay" for the free article, video, game, etc.
Customers have full privacy. Just "pay" with their capability to mine cryptocurrencies.
How much money can be made from cryptojacking?
The short answer is not much, but it depends on how much website traffic you get.
Maxence Cornet did a cryptomining experiment on a website that gets approximately 1k visits per day with a 0:55 second session duration.
The website mined 0.00947 XMR in 60 hours. That's a total of $0.89 or $0.36 per day.
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Is this legal?