The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this month for hijacking the computing power of visitors to mine for cryptocurrency, but the trend may be spreading. Reports Monday indicate that websites run by Showtime, the CBS Corp.-owned premium cable network, are doing the same thing.

Like with The Pirate Bay, two Showtime websites, Showtime.com and its instant-access website ShowtimeAnytime.com, were found to be running code from Coin Hive that uses Javascript on a given page to “borrow” the processing power of site visitors to mine for Monero, a smaller cryptocurrency that operates as an alternative to bitcoin and Ethereum.

The script, which can run up serious processor use, was throttled on the Showtime sites, with the setThrottle value set at 0.97, meaning the mining script remains dormant for 97 percent of the time a visitor is on the websites, making it more difficult to detect.

Showtime itself hasn’t officially commented on the cryptominer appearing on their websites, leaving speculation wide open as to whether the code was intentionally installed by Showtime as an experiment or whether the site was hacked. Bleeping Computing is going with the likelihood that it’s an experiment by Showtime to raise money from users, while others such as The Wrap are going with the hacking conspiracy theory.

Irrespective of how the code appeared on the Showtime sites, the use of cryptomining Javascript injections on websites to raise money as an alternative to advertising appears to be growing in popularity.

“There seems to be a trend lately for publishers to monetize their traffic by having their visitors mine for cryptocurrencies while on their site,” Jérôme Segura from Malwarebytes Labs said in a blog post. “The idea is that you are accessing content for free and in exchange, your computer (its CPU in particular) will be used for mining purposes. Needless to say, this practice is raising many eyebrows and not everyone is on the same page about whether this new business model could be a long-term replacement for ads, although most people agree that ads are often annoying and malicious.”

Although the practice is still fairly rare, users who are concerned about having their computers hijacked for cryptomining can protect themselves by running an adblocker such as Adblock Plus, which added a block to cryptominers last week. Or they can use a dedicated cryptomining block browser add-on such as the Google Chrome extension No Coin.

Photo: Steve F/Wikimedia Commons