Showtime Websites Rigged to Mine Cryptocurrency

Two official websites belonging to premium TV giant Showtime were recently rigged to stealthily use visitors' Web browsers to mine cryptocurrency, according to reports.

The Coinhive code, which uses visitors' CPU power to mine the cryptocurrency Monero, was found on the CBS Corporation subsidiary's official site — Showtime.com — along with ShowtimeAnytime.com, according to Bad Packets Report.

A Twitter user first sounded the alarm about this over the weekend, and the controversial code disappeared by Monday. There's no word as to how, exactly, it got there. Showtime declined to comment when contacted by PCMag on Tuesday.

"Once a user visits the website, they unwittingly start mining the cryptocurrency Monero," the folks at Bad Packets Report explained. "This can put a tremendous load on the CPU of anyone who visits a website with the Coinhive miner on it."

In fact, the software used as much as 60 percent of a visitors' CPU capacity.

As The Register noted, it's unlikely that Showtime or its parent CBS purposefully added this code to the sites. It seems more likely that someone hacked into the sites and inserted it for their own gain.

Meanwhile, Coinhive also recently appeared on The Pirate Bay before the site's operators removed it.

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"As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner," The Pirate Bay reportedly said in a statement. "This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running."

Sites probably won't make as much with Coinhive as they can running ads, but the returns aren't too bad. According to TorrentFreak, a site with 30,000 daily users can rake in around $500 and $600 when running the miner at just 50 percent.