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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

That’s also how physicists
Dark matter may think of dark matter, the stuff that Are you making
keeps galaxies from flying apart. cryptocurrency
be dead neutrons Dark matter may not interact with for crooks?
normal matter, except through
gravity. Fornal and Grinstein
analysed ways in which a neutron ADBLOCKERS are trying to prevent
Anil Ananthaswamy to estimate the length of the might decay into a“dark”particle, people from accidentally helping
particle’s life. This method makes which would happen about once hackers mine cryptocurrencies.
THE humble neutron could no assumptions about how a in every 100 neutron decays. Malicious code running in the
be hiding a deep, dark secret. neutron decays, and it comes up They showed that if such a background of thousands of web
A puzzling discrepancy in the with a lifetime of 879.6 seconds. particle were to be a candidate pages can hijack a visitor’s computing
lifetime of the particle may be The discrepancy in the values for dark matter, its mass would power to generate cryptocurrency –
solved if neutrons sometimes generated by the beam and bottle need to be just slightly less than digital currency of which bitcoin is
decay into dark matter, the stuff experiments has frustrated that of the neutron (arxiv.org/ an example. Called cryptojacking,
purported to make up most of particle physicists for 20 years. abs/1801.01124). In some there is no sure way to avoid it, but
the missing mass of the universe. So, Bartosz Fornal and Benjamin scenarios, the difference in blacklists kept by adblockers can
“What we thought were our Grinstein at the University of mass would show up as a photon shield you from the worst culprits.
most likely ideas for what dark California, San Diego, wondered with an energy between 0.8 and Around 95 per cent of cryptojacking
matter might be, none of those if neutrons might decay in other 1.7megaelectronvolts – something code is a modified form of something
have worked,”says Dan Hooper we could potentially detect. produced by German firm Coinhive.
at Fermilab near Batavia, Illinois, “Our most likely ideas Hooper is intrigued. “If I were The firm’s business model is that,
who wasn’t involved in the for what dark matter convinced that there was really instead of being bombarded by
research, but thinks the neutron might be, none of a neutron decay anomaly and it adverts, website visitors can mine a
idea is worth considering. those have worked” required some decay to an exotic small amount of the cryptocurrency
Two distinct experiments state, the $64,000 question that Monero. The websites get an income,
produce different answers for the ways. This could explain the it makes you want to ask is: why of which Coinhive gets a 30 per cent
lifespanofaneutron.Inthe“beam longer lifetime via the beam is this state almost exactly the cut, and visitors can browse ad-free.
experiment”, the neutron morphs method, which only accounts same mass as the neutron?” Coinhive asks users before nabbing
into a proton in 888 seconds, for beta decay.“The more The answer may lie in theories their processing power. However,
via a process called beta decay. ways the particle can decay, called asymmetric dark matter hackers are secretly placing a variant of
Then there is the“bottle the shorter it lives,”says Fornal. models, in which neutrons the code that doesn’t onto thousands
experiment”: a container of If they are right, a new process and dark matter particles have of websites. This means anyone who
ultracold neutrons is monitored of neutrondecaywouldproduce comparable mass because they visits those sites ends up unwittingly
for varying lengths of time, and somemysteryparticle.“Ithasto were produced by similar generating cryptocurrency for the
those left after each stage are used be something that doesn’t processes in the early universe. hacker who sneaked in the code.
interact strongly with our Such models would get a boost if Official government pages,
Now you see it... dark matter is all matter,”says Fornal. Otherwise, Fornal and Grinstein’s ideas can including two Ukrainian ministerial
around but its nature is a mystery we would have seen it by now. be experimentally verified. ■ sites and the website of the president
of Bangladesh, have been hacked in
this way. In total, the malicious code
has been found running on at least
36,000 websites, and in 291 Android
apps, according to analyses by Robert
Baptiste, a researcher from French
security company fsociety, and Troy
VOLKER SPRINGEL/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR ASTROPHYSICS/SPL an estimated $150,000 per month.
Mursch, who runs Bad Packets Report,
a computer security website.
In total, cryptojacking rakes in

“Once it’s placed on a website, anyone
on any device with a web browser
that visits that site immediately starts
mining,” says Mursch.
Users can protect themselves with
an adblocker. As well as blocking ads,

known to host cryptojacking code and
can warn users. Chris Stokel-Walker ■

16 | NewScientist | 20 January 2018 these programs keep a list of websites