Have you ever visited or watched a video on the Website YouTube? I’m sure most of us have at some point. Last week it was discovered, in a YouTube ad hack, that hackers have used the video streaming giant to mine cryptocurrency on users computers. Just recently the company started implementing more advertisements into its videos, as it has always had advertisements before and between videos, and it seems hackers took advantage of this. How was the YouTube cryptocurrency hack discovered? While users were watching ads on YouTube, it automatically triggered anti-virus software on some computers. This raised a big red flag for some and they automatically contacted the company.

On investigating, the company discovered the adverts contained a mining code called CoinHive. CoinHive acted as a malware attack and secretly used up to 80% of the video watcher’s central processing computer units to mine various cryptocurrencies. The primary reason for using someone else’s computer to mine is due to the fact that it takes a lot of computing power to mine cryptocurrency. The hackers were trying to steal the power from other to mine the digital currency on their behalf.