Pirate Bay Taps Visitors’ Computers To Mine Cryptocurrency

The Pirate Bay, a notorious torrent website, tried a new way to monetize its site: using its visitors’ processing power to mine virtual coins.

The Pirate Bay allows users to swap media files, like movies or music, and has run into legal trouble many times for assisting copyright infringement. Visitors on Sept. 16 reported an uptick in their CPU use. Some digging revealed it was an in-browser currency miner for Monero coins that automatically started when visiting certain pages, Engadget reported.

The website operators told TorrentFreak it was testing a currency miner for Monero coins, and later posted on a blog that it was a limited-time-only test to determine if it could replace its ad revenue.