How to prevent PC from bitcoin mining?

Did your PC get heat up while browsing on any site? Did your CPU usage increases on certain site? Did your mobile phone get heat up? If so, you're a victim of Cryptohijacking. Let's discuss how we can prevent our PC from bitcoin mining.

What is Cryptohijacking?

It is the hijacking of your CPU power for mining currencies like bitcoin. Mining is a computationally intensive process that computers comprising a cryptocurrency network complete to verify the transaction record, called the blockchain, and receive digital coins in return. Some websites replaced displaying ads with mining bitcoin to earn money.

How Cryptohijacking works?

Hackers run a script(i.e JavaScript) in the background of the site. Their aim is to steal computer power for mining operations. It is done secretly on websites with a larger number of visitors. Some website owners do it for the sake of money, while some other websites are hijacked by malware. Hackers are using a variety of approaches to hijack computers.
The malware containing cryptocurrency mining tool can be straightforwardly detected by antivirus, says by a Cyber Security expert. While some inside integration of scripts by technical and network experts are difficult to detect.
Some days ago, a popular torrent website The Pirate Bay was consuming CPU power of their visitors for bitcoin mining. The website has tucked away a coin mining code provided by Coinhive in the footer of the website which uses visitors’ CPU power to generate Monero coins – a type of cryptocurrency. The Pirate Bay later acknowledged this fact and said they were using 20-30% CPU power.
Several other websites have been using cryptocurrency mining tool to utilize their visitor's CPU usage, without their permissions and notifying them.

Has your browser been hijacked to mine cryptocurrency? 

You can check either your CPU is hijacked or not. Go to start and type view running processes with Task Manager. Click on Performance tab, see analyze your CPU performance.

Prevent PC from Bitcoin mining

There are some ways to prevent PC from Bitcoin mining. Some of them are discussed below:

Disable JavaScript on your browser.

Watch this video tutorial to disable JavaScript on Chrome browser. Disabling JavaScript may affect browser rendering.

Install extension on your browser

Installing extensions like minerBlock or No Coin prevents cryptocurrency mining operations.

Have a safe browsing pals!