Oh great, even Chrome extensions are mining cryptocurrency now.
Unregulated crypto-currencies have soared in value this past year, making a few millionaires and worrying a few hedge fund managers in the process. But crypto-currencies have also been great news for hackers and unscrupulous investors, who can use them for nefarious tricks.
One up-and-coming form of malware is called “crypto-jacking,” a process whereby a perfectly useful program secretly mines Bitcoin or some other crypto-currency in the background. The amount of mining on any one machine is insignificant — likely a value of a few cents per day, if that — but distributed over tens of thousands of machines, it can make a developer real money.
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