HN Explorer

Imageboard-Users donating thousends of € to protest against KrebsOnSecurity

50 points by Mudhenn ↗ HN
After Brian Krebs published an article about coinhive, in which he also revealed the identity of the people behind pr0gramm.com, a german imageboard, the users are expressing their protest by donating to the german "Krebshilfe" (Krebs is german for cancer) with the subject "Krebs ist scheiße >_" (Krebs is shit and the pr0gramm-Logo). This lead not only to ten-thousends of euros in donations but also crashes the servers of the NPO and also of pr0gramm, as the users are uploading pictures of their donations to the board. German source: http://www.t-online.de/digital/internet/id_83466874/pr0gramm-community-laesst-mit-spenden-gegen-krebs-seite-der-krebshilfe-abstuerzen.html Hashtag on Twitter is #krebsiscancer

13 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] thread
mechazawa
What relation did Pr0 have with coinhive?
nougatbyte
As far as I know did the old pr0 administrator developed Coinhive and tested it together with the new admin on pr0gramm.

But when he developed Coinhive he didn't even was pr0s admin anymore. Krebs assumed that the new admin is involved with coinhub and doxxed him too.

ant13
coinhives earlier state was tested on pr0 with their permission
memememe-memeeh
It also has to be noted that everyone testing the "prototype" coinhive code knew that he was mining and had to manually start the miner. Coinhive also stops the payouts to all websites that get reported for the illegal use of it.
zdkl
It appears `Cha0s, erstwhile admin of pr0gramm, after transfering admin duties to `Gamb pursued different ventures. It seems he developed coinhive independantly of pr0gramm and it's team (I can't verify this, but why not). The product was tested on pr0gramm some time ago, where users would run the miner in exchange for premium account time. The coinhive site appeared after this(, as far as I remember without mention of pr0gramm or identifying the admin as `Chaos). I don't know of anything proven beyond that.

(Edit) See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pr0gramm pr0 "official statement" https://img.pr0gramm.com/2018/03/26/6300254f309e8f69.png

I should add that I am not affiliated with anyone here, just a user of that board.

hypfer
Brian basically doxxed random people for developing something that can also be used by criminals.
husomchusoface
This has been going on for more than 16hours and no end in sight. The cancer fund's website even collapsed because there were so many people trying to make a donation
blattimwind
How exactly does coinhive qualify as malware?
usernam33
People use it to do bad things, so this thing must be fundamentally evil. It is so evil, it does steal your processing power, that is worse than loss of personal data like credit cards and deserves to be the most evil malware of the millennium.

/s

randomITguy
Yep. in the testing stage and after that the miner was tested on an subdomain; on every other part of their website was no miner. Since Coinhave exists many creators of content switched or added the coinhive javascript miner which allows to mine the cryptocurrency monero without a seperate programm. But on high load on the processor.

Most sites showed a message and gave the users the option und most times also a guide, to prohibit or disable this specific java script. But others like thepiratebay just added it with neither named to the user nor was it easy to disable (without turning off all JavaScripts)

As administrator of an network with 300 computer workstation all connected up with central antivirus, we had up to 10k Virus warnings in the browser caches.

usernam33
If the numbers of other places detections are simmilar high I can now partly understand the negative backlash.
p_rall
I seriously cannot... I`m part of the pr0gramm-community and was there, when cha0s tested coinhive the first time. The way thepiratebay and other sites used coinhive wasn`t part of cha0s´intention in any way. Most great ideas get ripped out of the correct context so others get their benefits.