Guys, you're killing us! LA Times homicide site hacked to mine crypto-coins on netizens' PCs

A Los Angeles Times' website has been silently mining crypto-coins using visitors' web browsers and PCs for several days – after hackers snuck mining code onto its webpages. The newspaper's IT staffers left at least one of the publication's Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage buckets wide open to anyone on the internet to …

[Mayday]

Ordinary state of affairs

http://homicide.latimes.com/

That a newspaper/site feels compelled to make a site such as this to track such activities.

'Murica etc

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

Re: Ordinary state of affairs

I was thinking the same thing.

Mind you, this map should become purely academic soon - I heard on the news this morning that the Trumpster wants to solve the problem of gun crime by having more people have more guns. What a f***ing visionary.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ordinary state of affairs

I actually thought El Reg was being sarcastic with that headline "LA Times homicide site"

So they actually have a subdomain dedicated to murders?

Like a sports section, or a science and technology section

Wow

What a fucked up country, where this shit is just... normal.

I wonder if the NRA invests in funeral parlors, that would be a good move, capitalism FTW /SARCASM

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this why my PC at work is so damn slow?

After it ignored my inputs today (perhaps it was busy mining crypto-currencies, folding proteins or calculating the next thousand digits of Pi), I successfully resisted - again - the urge to punch it in the face (LCD) and I merely rebooted the f***ing p**** of s***.

Rebooting didn't help.

Perhaps my company should buy PCs more often than once every 10+ years. And perhaps they should consider not combining museum-age PCs with new IT security policies to run the browser within a VM.

If I did run it through a shredder, I'd have to compensate the Company the Book Value of the 10 year old PC hardware, which is presumably $0.00. [joke alert]

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is this why my PC at work is so damn slow?

And perhaps they should consider not combining museum-age PCs with new IT security policies

Fear not, stressed little office worker, for this problem is self-limiting.

I was in exactly the same situation as you, with an elderly laptop packed to the gills with security software mandated by senior management. The laptop got so stressed with stuff running in the background that the CPU cooling fan burned out, and then shortly afterwards experienced a failed-through-overheating motherboard. A suitably temimnal ailment which led to an upgrade to something more up-to-date