CBS’ Showtime Site Hijacks User PCs To Mine Cryptocurrency, Impending Epidemic?

Recently, the torrent site The Pirate Bay was caught testing a new method of earning revenue by basically adding a script to some of its pages, which would hijack the PCs of users in order to mine cryptocurrency. Recently, it was found that the website for Showtime, which is owned by the CBS TV network was doing the same thing.

One of the first to notice the script running in the background of Showtime’s website is a Twitter user who posted about it last Saturday. Subsequent replies noted the similarities between the script used on The Pirate Bay’s website.

The script basically hijacks the CPU of users who go to the page in order to use it as an extra source of juice in mining cryptocurrency coins. Mining requires a significant amount of computing power and having access to thousands if not, millions of PCs would certainly give miners an edge.

Since then, the script has apparently been removed, which should come as a relief to users who might have been binge watching Twin Peaks. Unfortunately, Showtime has so far refused to answer why the script was on the website in the first place, Gizmodo reports.

Now, it’s worth noting that using this kind of tactic is not exactly nefarious, in and of itself. It’s basically another way for websites to generate revenue aside from ads. The bigger issue, however, is the fact that these websites are not informing their users that such a script is running on their web pages. This gives way to both feelings of betrayal and concerns of security risks.

On the matter of Showtime’s website, there are currently two possibilities being presented. One is that the company knowingly added the script, which would actually be preferable. The other possibility is that someone managed to break into the site’s security and add the script, which would be infinitely more worrisome. Unless Showtime confirms anything, it’s useful to assume the worst.