After years of accepting donations via Bitcoin, last month various ‘pirate’ sites began to generate digital currency revenues in a brand new way.
It all began with The Pirate Bay, which quietly added a Javascript cryptocurrency miner to its main site, something that first manifested itself as a large spike in CPU utilization on the machines of visitors.
The stealth addition to the platform, which its operators later described as a test, was extremely controversial. While many thought of the miner as a cool and innovative way to generate revenue in a secure fashion, a vocal majority expressed a preference for permission being requested first, in case they didn’t want to participate in the program.
Over the past couple of weeks, several other sites have added similar miners, some which ask permission to run and others that do not. While the former probably aren’t considered problematic, the latter are now being viewed as a serious problem by an unexpected player in the ecosystem.
TorrentFreak has learned that popular CDN service Cloudflare, which is often criticized for not being harsh enough on ‘pirate’ sites, is actively suspending the accounts of sites that deploy cryptocurrency miners on their platforms.
“Cloudflare kicked us from their service for using a Coinhive miner,” the operator of ProxyBunker.online informed TF this morning.
ProxyBunker is a site that that links to several other domains that offer unofficial proxy services for the likes of The Pirate Bay, RARBG, KickassTorrents, Torrentz2, and dozens of other sites. It first tested a miner for four days starting September 23. Official implementation began October 1 but was ended last evening, abruptly.
“Late last night, all our domains got deleted off Cloudflare without warning so I emailed Cloudflare to ask what was going on,” the operator explained.
As the email above shows, Cloudflare cited only a “possible” terms of service violation. Further clarification was needed to get to the root of the problem.
So, just a few minutes later, the site operator contacted Cloudflare, acknowledging the suspension but pointing out that the notification email was somewhat vague and didn’t give a reason for the violation. A follow-up email from Cloudflare certainly put some meat on the bones.
“Multiple domains in your account were injecting Coinhive mining code without
notifying users and without any option to disabling [sic] the mining,” wrote Justin Paine, Head of Trust & Safety at Cloudflare.
“We consider this to be malware, and as such the account was suspended, and all domains removed from Cloudflare.”
ProxyBunker’s operator wrote back to Cloudflare explaining that the Coinhive miner had been running on his domains but that his main domain had a way of disabling mining, as per new code made available from Coinhive.
“We were running the miner on our proxybunker.online domain using Coinhive’s new Javacode Simple Miner UI that lets the user stop the miner at anytime and set the CPU speed it mines at,” he told TF.
Nevertheless, some element of the configuration appears to have fallen short of Cloudflare’s standards. So, shortly after Cloudflare’s explanation, the site operator asked if he could be reinstated if he completely removed the miner from his site. The response was a ‘yes’ but with a stern caveat attached.
“We will remove the account suspension, however do note you’ll need to re-sign up the domains as they were removed as a result of the account suspension. Please note — if we discover similar activity again the domains and account will be permanently blocked,” Cloudflare’s Justin warned.
ProxyBunker’s operator says that while he sees the value in cryptocurrency miners, he can understand why people might be opposed to them too. That being said, he would appreciate it if services like Cloudflare published clear guidelines on what is and is not acceptable.
“We do understand that most users will not like the miner using up a bit of their CPU but we do see the full potential as a new revenue stream,” he explains.
“I think third-party services need to post clear information that they’re not allowed on their services, if that’s the case.”
At time of publication, Cloudflare had not responded to TorrentFreak’s requests for comment.
