Chrome team might enable mining virus protection soon

It was not long before browser developers decided to counter what is already called “malvertising”, malicious advertising built in the code of different websites that allows hackers to use the site page as an easy mining pool. Computers where an infected page is opened start to mine cryptocurrency (Monero has an overwhelming majority right now) without visitors even knowing it.

Ojan Vafai, a software engineer in Google, has openly proposed to create an in-Chrome efficient malware blocker that plays on the power consumption modes:

“If a site is using more than XX% CPU for more than YY seconds, then we put the page into ‘battery saver mode’ where we aggressively throttle tasks and show a toast allowing the user to opt-out of battery saver mode. When a battery saver mode tab is backgrounded, we stop running tasks entirely.

I think we'll want measurement to figure out what values to use for XX and YY, but we can start with really egregious things like 100% and 60 seconds.

I'm effectively suggesting we add a permission here, but it would have unusual triggering conditions (e.g. no requestUseLotsOfCPU method). It only triggers when the page is doing a likely bad thing.”

The mechanism looks credible, and if not Chrome, than some other browser will implement something similar very soon. However, there is a reason to believe that this project will not go unnoticed in Google, where Mr. Vafai works. Inventive Mozilla plugin makers, meanwhile, can develop an add-on based on a similar principle.