Opera Browser has become the world’s first web browser to protect its users from Cryptojacking hackers. Telenor the largest Norwegian Telecommunications Company launched Opera in 1994 and now a beta version of Opera 50 is being offered to Windows, Linux, and Mac OS users with an in-built cryptocurrency mining blocker.
Thus, the feature presents a new kind of defense against the rise of crypto jacking cyber threat or browser-based cryptocurrency miners.
Cryptojacking is nothing but a cyber attack where the hacker induces a malware into the browser of a PC user visiting a website which later helps the hacker/developer to use the CPU power of the website visitor to mine digital currency without the owner’s consent.
Technically speaking, cyber crooks are increasingly using JavaScript mining malware on compromised websites or deploying the same onto sneaky pop-up windows. Such activity often leads to the usage of CPU power of a website visitor without his/her consent leading to performance issues of the concerned device/s.
Opera has added the cryptocurrency mining protection to its in-built ad-blocker where users just need to visit the settings page to activate their preferences.
To do so they need to put a tick mark beside the “NoCoin” settings which can be found in recommended lists of ad filters in the block ads page. With the setting turned on, pages embedded with cryptocurrency mining scripts will be blocked in a similar fashion that of ads.
Google has announced in September this year that it will introduce a similar feature to its Chrome browser at some time next year. And Firefox is said to follow the same soon.
According to the demographics of StatCounter released in October 2017, Opera’s web browser usage share is just 4.02% across all OS Platforms. As expected, Google Chrome leads the pack with 63.6% usage share followed by Mozilla Firefox with 13.04%.
Hope, the latest Cryptojackimg blocking feature of Opera helps the browser reach the second position if not the first place.
