Starbucks customer laptops hacked to mine cryptocurrency
Twitter user points out that a store in Buenos Aires had corrupted Wi-Fi and reports claim illegal script was using customer laptops to mine Monero coins
By David Reid
Coffee chain Starbucks says it has taken action to stop customer laptops being used to generate the cryptocurrency Monero.
On December 2, a Twitter user called Noah Dinkin posted a screenshot that showed that the public Wi-Fi available in a Starbucks store in Buenos Aires, Argentina, had been hacked and edited with unusual code.
Dinking claimed the code forced a delay when he first connected to the internet there, allowing the Wi-Fi provider to mine bitcoin using his computer’s processing power.
Since the tweet, both Hackread.com and Blockexplorer.com have reported that the script was in fact Coinhive code, which was used to generate Monero coins.