It turns out torrenting platforms are not the only ones toying with alternative methods to convert traffic to cash. A week after The Pirate Bay admitted to secretly running a crypto miner to borrow visitors’ CPU resources to bank on Monero coins, television giant CBS was caught doing the same with Showtime.
In fact, the popular broadcaster had purportedly implemented the mining solution on two official Showtime network websites – Showtime.com and ShowtimeAnytime.com – according to information security analyst Troy
Mursch, who first documented the discovery acting on a tip from Twitter user
SkensNet.
What is especially outrageous is that CBS had enabled the mining software on Showtime’s sites without any notification or request for consent to its subscribers. For more context, the miner was taking up to 60 percent of the overall visitors’ CPU capacity when
ShowtimeAnytime.com was sitting idle in browsers.
Following coverage from The Register and Gizmodo, CBS appears to have removed the mining tech from the websites. Fortunately, Mursch was fast enough to save screenshots from Showtime’s website before, during and after running the miner.
To continue reading, including browsing through the source code evidence click here.
Sources:
The Next Web
Google Play Newsstand
Sources:
The Next Web
Google Play Newsstand
