The usage of browsers for digital currency’s mining is becoming a significant problem. Too many people will continue to be affected by this attack. Too much sites incorporate in-browser mining scripts and web extensions, injecting them into web pages. So let’s make a deal with browser miners.
When a browser is “infected” by in-browser miner, the computer’s CPU will be used to mine for digital currency such as Monero. That is why your CPU will run at high temperatures for extended periods of time and could be damaged.
You may notice that your browser is being used for mining of crypto currency, if your computer becomes slower, starts to freeze, or even shuts down from overheating.
How to Detect if Sites or Extension are Using Too Much CPU and Remove Them:
- STEP 1: At first, open the Chrome Task Manager. To do so, just press Shift+ESC in Google Chrome, or run it from it’s menu: More Tools – Chrome Task Manager.
- STEP 2: Then you will see a list of processes and how much CPU each is using. For each site, extension, internal process, and subframe that is open, a new process will be listed.
- STEP 3: After that, simply click once on process with high CPU usage to select it and then click on the End Process button. Once this tab is closed, your computer should go back to running normally and it would be a good idea to avoid that site in the future.
- STEP 4: At last, if high CPU utilization is caused by Extension, not by site, double click on Extension’s name in the Chrome Task Manager. It will bring you to the extensions list with this extension highlighted. Just remove the extension by clicking on the associated trash can as shown at picture below.
Note: Sometimes the extension opens an iframe that loads the in-browser miner. You can simply double-click on the sub-frame and Chrome will bring you to the extensions list with the extension highlighted that the subframe belongs to. Just remove all selected extensions as you did at Step 4.
