Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide: cryptojacking now on Youtube

A video streaming service is a perfect place to launch a cryptojacking script. Users watch videos, and their computers are busy mining cryptocurrencies for the script’s owner. Youtube is a video platform with a huge audience, but unfortunately its owner Google is too selfish to let anyone run a mining script there.

But it lets people run ads inside Youtube videos! So, it is simple: a villain enriches an ad with a piece of Javascript code and displays it through the Double Click ad platform that also belongs to Google. Since he is evil and greedy, he adds a fake antivirus ad that would provoke people to download malware.

This malvertising campaign was exposed last week. Youtube users started complaining in social media that their antiviruses had warned about mining attempts while they were watching videos. The researchers from the security company Trend Micro saw the number of Coinhive web miner detections triple due to the campaign.

This is not the first case of combining the threats: malvertising has already proved itself as a means of cryptojacking code delivery. Just two weeks ago we wrote about hacked ads that mined Monero as well.