Websites and publishers need to be prepared for cryptocurrency miners slipping into ads on their sites, according to Israeli adtech firm Spotad.
The company, which operates an AI-powered advertising platform for purchasing media space, recently discovered cryptocurrency mining activity on its network, a development the company claims is becoming part of wider trend.
Spotads AI system, named "Sarah," recently identified anomalies in the code of seemingly legitimate ads for both desktop and mobile that turned out to be a miner for the cryptocurrency monero. The JavaScript-enabled ad was designed to dupe users into clicking on a pop-up that would initiate the mining process.
According to co-founder Yoav Oz, the agency responsible for the ad was unaware of the code that was embedded inside. The name of the agency or the subject of the ad has not been disclosed.
This has definitely already begun. It'll only be pushed to wider scales now. Luckily, most modern web browsers are releasing blocking software on their stores. Take a look at this example from Mozilla Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/miningblocker/Similarly, Chrome has a couple of mining blockers on their web store as well. I'm not too sure how they work (probably limit the CPU/GPU usage on the browser to a certain amount), but as far as I can tell from a couple of reviews, they're doing their jobs. I guess this will end up being a cat and mouse game between the hackers trying to bypass these new securities.