UFC Caught Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency

News | November 8, 2017 By:

Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), an American mixed martial arts organization based in Las Vegas, has been reportedly caught running a crypto miner on their website without an opt-in or opt-out.

Subscribers of the MMA organization took to social media to voice their concerns and disappointment after they found out that UFC has been secretly mining cryptocurrency using their systems. They said that a java script developed by Coinhive, a Monero code that can be embedded in a web page, was found in the code on the UFC Fight Pass streaming site.

UFC Fight Pass is a digital subscription service which gives fans access to exclusive live UFC events and fights, original and behind-the-scenes content not available anywhere else, and access to a martial arts fight library. UFC Fight Pass claims to have approximately 450,000 subscribers. Subscription costs around $9 per month, not including pay-per-view shows.

Neulion, UFC’s over-the-top digital service provider, reportedly reviewed the UFC.TV/FIGHTPASS site code and did not find any reference to the mentioned Coinhive java script. A UFC spokesperson also denied that there were coding issues.

In a statement, Coinhive said they didn’t notice any new ‘top user’ in their internal site wide dashboard.

UFC is not the first website accused of trying to monetize its traffic in secret by adding a mining script. Back in September, The Pirate Bay, the world’s most popular torrent site, has been found to be secretly planting an in-browser cryptocurrency miner on its website that utilizes its visitors’ CPU processing power in order to mine cryptocurrencies.