Cryptocurrencies have become the rage for the last 7 years and was fueled by the demand of the most famous cryptocurrency of all: Bitcoin. Later on, we have seen droves of various forms of cryptocurrencies which has made people to beef up their PCs or get new PCs that ‘mine’ for these currencies for profit.
Thanks to the boom in cryptocurrency mining, we have seen a very shady way of how some people are hacking laptops to take advantage of their processing power to mine these cryptocurrencies. Pirate Bay and Showtime websites were found to be mining cryptocurrency without the knowledge of customers and the same case happened here locally with NairobiWire website.
The trick was a javascript code hidden within the website code called Coinhive so that they can take advantage of a computer’s hardware to mine cryptocurrencies like Monero. This would lead to your CPU usage hitting the roof while surfing the affected page, which is not great at all.
Since these browser mining cases have become a trend, it has warranted the need to check out your processor usage to make sure that the website that you are visiting is not using your hardware for profit. However, if you use Chrome for Desktop, there are handy extensions that you can use to block coin miners on the web.
There are quite a number of coin miner blockers that you can download on the Chrome web store but so far, these two have the most users.
No Coin
No Coin is a simple Chrome extension that is aimed to block coin miners such as Coinhive, the one that has been causing chaos in the websphere.
When you install the extension, it will show you whether a webpage mines coins by showing a notification. When you tap on it on a known coin miner page like Pirate Bay, it shows that a coin miner has been detected and it is currently being blocked from mining. There is an option to whitelist pages (choice of 1 minute, 30 minutes or indefinitely) or pause the extension if you need to.
minerBlock
This is another Chrome extension just like No Coin that blocks cryptocurrency miners from all over the web. It also features generally the same features like disabling the blocker or adding websites to your whitelist.
However, this adds one more feature where you can add filters which are the various scripts of known javascript cryptominers. minerBlock already has 13 scripts that it looks out for, so this is great for those advanced users to add other scripts that they stumble upon.
