Due to a sudden spike in the crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in the recent times, many cyber-criminals have diverted their attention to them. Now they are surreptitiously injecting their coin-mining JavaScript code in various websites so that when you visit those sites, your web browser loads and start running the mining code in the background – this is called cryptojacking. As a result, your computer works at its maximum performance capacity, your computer’s CPU gets hot, the cooling fan runs at its top speed to cool the CPU down and the computer can even become unresponsive.
We have previously written about how you can use the in-built features in the Opera web browser to protect yourself from such coin-mining scripts and how you can use the NoMiner extension for the Firefox web browsers to block the coin-mining scripts. And now, the Opera developers have come up with a simple tool that tests your web browser’s crypto-currency miner defense.
The Cryptojacking Test can be taken by any web browser on any device. All you have to do is open the Cryptojacking Test web site https://cryptojackingtest.com/ in your web browser and then click/tap on the Start button and it will run the test in your web browser. The test takes only a few seconds to tell you whether your web browser is protected or not. You are shown a green smiley emoji when your web browser is protected and a long face sad emoji when your web browser fails the test.
We tested it all the popular web browsers for Windows and Linux – Chrome, Firefox and Opera. The latest versions of all these desktop web browsers are protected from cryptojacking according to this test. But when we tested the latest versions of the same browsers on Android, they all failed the test, well, except Opera as expected.
We suggest that you should not depend on just the web browser’s own defense against cryptojacking, but you should also install a proper antivirus software in your desktop computer as well as your mobile devices to provide complete defense against all malicious websites, apps and programs.