23,872 Websites Mine Cryptocurrencies Using Computers of Visitors

According to the latest research by Ahrefs, 23,872 websites are infected with crypto-mining scripts and are mining cryptocurrencies via devices of the unsuspecting visitors.

Tim Soulo, marketing manager at Ahrefs, as well as the author of the study, stated that the company analyzed more than 175M websites and found out that 23,872 of them are running scripts for cryptocurrency mining. In this, visitors’ computers and other gadgets serve as mining devices.

What’s interesting is about 91% of those crypto-mining websites get less than 50 visitors from Google monthly. That means that it is highly likely that the websites with crypto-mining scripts were hacked.

Based on this findings, Soulo assumed that low-traffic websites are more vulnerable to getting infected with crypto-mining scripts as hackers target them as easy pickings against the background of more advanced websites which tend to care about information security.

By the way, Chrome Web Store no longer accepts crypto-mining extensions. New policy serves to protect Chrome from hidden risks.