Laptops connected to Starbuck's Wi-Fi were allowed to participate in mining virtual currency without permission

byNicola Sap De Mitri

An event occurred that a customer's PC using Wi-Fi at Starbucks was secretly involved in the mining of the virtual currency without himself noticing it.

Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked People's Laptops to Mine Cryptocurrency - Motherboard
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyd5xq/starbucks-wi-fi-hijacked-peoples-laptops-to-mine-cryptocurrency-coinhive

The beginning of things is a mail creation service "stensulIt is the CEO ofNoah DinkinMr. tweets posted. Posting was written that in Buenos Aires' Starbucks, customers could forcibly participate in bit coin mining when connecting from Wi - Fi from laptop.

Hi@Starbucks@StarbucksArIt's a little off-brand .. cc@ GMFlickingerpic.twitter.com/VkVVdSfUtT

- Noah Dinkin (@ imnoah)December 2, 2017

An image showing the contents of the source code is displayed on the tweet posted by Dinkin, and "Coinhive(Coin hive) "Web service URL is shown. A coin hive is a service in which the operator of the website acquires the virtual currency and receives the revenue for the viewer, and some say that "it becomes a substitute for advertisement revenue, so it does not need to display an obstructive advertisement" Also criticism that it is. In Starbucks in Buenos Aires, this Coinhive was used.

Will the popular site become a source of income instead of virtual currency mining and advertisement with the CPU power of the viewer using the large number of accesses? - GIGAZINE


On December 11, 2017, Starbucks' official Twitter reacted to Dinkin's post. "As soon as we received a warning about a particular store in the past week, we took immediate action to solve the problem, and those who visited Starbucks can use Wi-Fi safely," he spells It was.

As soon as we were alerted of the situation in this store last week, we took swift action to resolve the issue provider resolved the issue and made the change needed in order to ensure our customers could use Wi-Fi in our store safely.

- Starbucks Coffee (@ Starbucks)December 11, 2017

Reggie Borges, Starbucks spokesperson for the interview for Motherboard, said, "I got in touch with my Internet service provider as soon as I received an indication, and Starbucks Wi-Fi is managed by Starbucks himself It is not what we can control, but we think that we want customers to use the Internet safely via Wi-Fi, so when we have something like this time , We are dealing closely with service providers. " Also, Mr. Borges showed a view that similar incidents will not occur in other stores.

About Motherboard this time "The method of mining virtual currency with a customer's laptop using a busy coffee shop's Wi-Fi is genius in a way as a means of earning income, while invasive It can also be thought that it is inappropriate. "