The Pirate Bay miner: Here's how to keep cryptocurrency miners away from using your CPU processing power

Popular torrent search portal, _The Pirate Bay_ was recently caught running a **cryptocurrency** miner on its website, essentially borrowing CPU processing power without the user’s knowledge. [caption id=“attachment_4053361” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image credit: Wikimedia[/caption] While the website did confess to having been ’testing’ the **Monero** JavaScript mine in order to what the portal claims to fight ads while still having a source of income “to keep the site running.” This does work as a clarification and as well as an excuse but should users want to keep other websites away from doing this, there is a way to ensure it. The Pirate Bay in their short blog post mentions that the cryptocurrency mine used can be kept away using a normal ad-blocker. This could keep the particular miner used in this case away. However, The Next Web in its report recommends ‘ minerBlock’ and ‘ No Coin’ extensions for **Google Chrome** users. JavaScript-blocking extensions such as ‘ NoScript’ for Firefox users and ‘ ScriptSafe’ for Chrome users can also be employed. Exceptions can also be added while using the plugins, as is the case with ad-blocker extensions. The report also adds that whether one decides to use these extensions or not, crypto-miners like the one used by The Pirate Bay could be difficult to spot unless a sudden spike in CPU usage is spotted. Motherboard in its report also poses the question of whether crypto mining is a better alternative to spammy ads but also summarises the argument by how it all boils down to user consent, unlike how The Pirate Bay went ahead with it, without informing its users ahead.