Today at Memeburn: why the site was temporarily down

On 20 September, you may have noticed that Memeburn was inaccessible. On Monday, you also may have noticed a spike in CPU usage when visiting any of the site’s pages.

Upon deeper inspection by our developers, we discovered a script that used our visitor’s CPU power to mine cryptocurrency.

The script was injected into a segment of our website’s source code.

Said script was from Coinhive — a service that allows site admins to embed a line of Javascript in their websites to secretly mine a cryptocurrency called Monero.

The Pirate Bay also sported a similar line of code in a covert test of another possible revenue stream. But while The Pirate Bay did this deliberately, Memeburn was only made aware of the issue after a report from one of our readers.

Once we discovered its severity, we made the decision to take down the site until the the script was removed.

We take our readers’ safety and security seriously, and a deep investigation into how the script was placed into the site is currently underway.

We would like to apologize to everyone affected or inconvenienced by the issue.

Memeburn is now accessible once again.