BitCoinMiner Detected
Thread Starter

Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 1,442
Likes: 55
From: Under a recently defunct flight path.
Running Safari on my iMac (High Sierra 10.13.3), just after clicking on a link in Twitter to a US-based photo gear review website, Sophos Home anti-virus flagged up a warning about something called 'BitCoinMiner'.
Am also running Malwarebytes but that did not warn about it.
There was an article the other day in The Times about this (or something similar) using lots of Government and corporate computing power to do whatever BitCoinMiner does. Did not expect a respected website to pass it on to me!
Anyone know how secure (or otherwise) Javascript is in Safari - could this be the route taken by the virus? Disabling Javascript causes some sites (such as Flickr) to not run properly.
Am also running Malwarebytes but that did not warn about it. There was an article the other day in The Times about this (or something similar) using lots of Government and corporate computing power to do whatever BitCoinMiner does. Did not expect a respected website to pass it on to me!
Anyone know how secure (or otherwise) Javascript is in Safari - could this be the route taken by the virus? Disabling Javascript causes some sites (such as Flickr) to not run properly.
Thread Starter

Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 1,442
Likes: 55
From: Under a recently defunct flight path.
Thanks. There is only one extension in there - Amazon Assistant. Part of a report I read said:-
Hence my question re Javascript.
The infection source in this case seems to have been browsealoud DOT com, a service run by a company called Texthelp Limited.
The browsealoud site serves up JavaScript that can convert pages on your website to speech, in order to help out visitors who aren’t fluent in English, or who aren’t good at reading.
The browsealoud site serves up JavaScript that can convert pages on your website to speech, in order to help out visitors who aren’t fluent in English, or who aren’t good at reading.




