Crypto Currency Mining
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- Last Updated: Wednesday, 26 February 2025 14:42
Currency Mining
Digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, simulate their real world counterparts like gold, in that they must be mined. This is done by calculations on numbers to find those that generate hashes with specific characteristics. Initially this is not difficult, but over time as more are found the difficulty increases. The faster the calculations can be performed, the greater the chance of one can be found. Unfortunately, increasing the computing power requires greater and greater amounts of electricity to succeed, to the point where the value of the currency found is less that the cost of running the computers. Thus locations with cheap power are highly sort after.
A solution to the power problem was to copy the techniques used by Ransomware, but instead of demanding a payment for a decrypting key, use the infected computer to do the mining. The beauty of this is that if the miner is well written, the owner of the infected PC is unlikely to notice and there are potentially millions of potential candidates on the internet. If well written, a miner program would be careful to leave plenty of CPU cycles for the owners use, and to even halt when the computer is otherwise very busy. Of course, people get greedy and lazy and eventually the owner notices. Its actually very easy to check this. Right click the task bar and choose Start Task Manger and then select the Performance tab. CPU usage should average only a few percent except when busy. Running an AV scan can push it up considerably, although some have user settings to limit this rate. If the usage is always close to 100% then the reason should be investigated. Switching to the Task Manger Processes tab shows all these and the CPU column shows the percentage each task is using. With the exception of the idle task, typically in the 90's, anything consistently high should be suspect. Most should be zero with the occasional count to 1 or 2. Right clicking a single task gives options to investigate and maybe stop these.
Eventually, AV programs began to recognise and stop these. However, the idea was adopted by a company who provided a mining service for web-sites to use by offering background mining to those browsing the site in lieu of advertising or a pay-wall. The company then remunerated the web-site according to their share of the service profits. The miner would only load and run if the viewer of the web-site agreed, and it ran only while they were connected to that site. This was actually a well thought out system and really a win-win for everyone. While browsing, CPU usage is mostly low as viewers spend most of the time reading. Unfortunately, some sites and some bad hackers didn't obey the companies rules and the source of web-miners have since been forced to discontinue the service. Its likely though that another source will eventually appear with maybe stricter control.