Protecting Mac from Hidden Mining (Topic)

During your usual surfing on the Internet, your computer starts to slow down a lot, and its coolers are getting ready to take off? Welcome to the wonderful world of cryptocurrencies! Now your Mac has become a full-fledged link in the blockchain and cryptocurrency mining. Not for you ...

Signs of the presence of a miner virus on the computer

The main sign that a miner program has infiltrated the Mac and calculates hashes for mining cryptocurrency is a decrease in computer speed and an increase in energy consumption. A good antivirus will detect a threat and block malware or reset the connection to a site whose page has a built-in miner. But this is not always the case.

Similar viruses appeared about three years ago and were originally designed for bitcoin mining. With the increasing complexity of calculating blocks for the "king" of cryptocurrencies, attackers switched to other coins that can be mined by a regular home PC. Of particular interest among hackers are gaming computers equipped with powerful modern processors and video cards.

Finding a malicious program

In thePrograms menu - > Utilities - > System Monitoropen the CPU tab and select the tasks to be performed depending on the CPU load. The malware will be among the first, consuming the lion's share of the processor power and battery power of your Macbook or iMac.

Protection against script miners

If, in the case of a virus, good antivirus software or reinstalling the operating system will help, then other methods will help protect yourself from miners while surfing the Internet. Some site owners install a special script in the page code that forces the computer of the resource visitor to mine cryptocurrency. The longer the user stays on the page, the more income the site owner will receive.

Monitoring CPU temperature and cooler RPM

A banal, but quite effective way. Unless the Mac is handling complex video or 3D graphics, its performance is in the middle range. If the values increase significantly, open System Monitor and make sure that one of the open pages does not load the laptop completely.

Special browser extensions

For many browsers, special extensions have been developed that signal a visit to pages with a built-in miner and suspend the process of mining cryptocurrency.

Blocking access to hosts

macOS, Linux and Windows have a special file that specifies the rules for accessing Internet addresses. It's called hosts. To access it in macOS, open the Terminal and enter the line:

sudo nano / etc / hosts /

Then the file needs to be edited, that is, add the following entry to it:

0.0.0.0 coin-hive.com

The specified address is owned by a common web miner. It is accessed by most sites on the Internet that have hidden miners on their pages. If new bad addresses appear, they can be added to hosts in the same way.

JavaScript blocking

This is the most effective method of dealing with miners, but it must be used carefully. It is better to use special plugins for blocking, for example, No Script.

The Topic of Article: Protecting Mac from Hidden Mining.
Author: Jake Pinkman