VANCOUVER — Anyone casually surfing the internet at home can be deployed as an unwittingly productive member of a hacker’s workforce, a practice known as “cryptojacking” that is on the rise. The exercise is hugely taxing on a computer’s processing power and the electricity it requires is expensive. “It basically just hogs your CPU,” said Konstantin Beznosov, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s electrical and computer engineering department. Charity Mine asks users to keep its site open in a tab, so their unused CPU power can generate Monero for charity. While it’s raised less than US$13 to date, the site estimates four million users could create roughly US$7.1 million annually.

Source: National Post November 19, 2017 15:00 UTC