So far in 2018, the NGO has launched two
charity campaigns with the aim of raising funds through cryptocurrency mining.
Many cryptocurrencies have
been associated with cybercrime, especially Monero, which has led to many people considering them
unethical. And the fact that cryptocurrency miners are at the top of the worldwide
ranking of threats only worsens their image.
A few months ago we tried to explain why mining scripts were being detected as “potentially unwanted
applications”, since these scripts are not malicious by themselves,
but when used without the required permission and in an unethical way they
can be troublesome for users. No tool is good or bad —it all depends on who
uses it and what they use it for.
And so this article explores a case in which
cryptocurrency mining is being used for a noble act and a good cause. As is the
case for UNICEF, which has discovered a pioneering new way of raising
funds for its humanitarian causes. This year, the NGO launched two
campaigns in which it does not ask for direct money donations, but rather
computer resources and processing power for cryptocurrency mining.
The first campaign was launched in February,
2018 under the “Game
Chaingers” program, and ran until March 31. It was an initiative of UNICEF
France, and its aim was to raise funds for children in Syria who are
severely affected by the humanitarian crisis and the war. This campaign ended
on March 31.
The second campaign is currently
active, and was launched by UNICEF Australia on April 29. A site called
“TheHopePage” was created for this campaign, with the aim of raising funds
for the approximately 340,000 Burmese children who are currently refugees in
Bangladesh due to the violent crisis unleashed in their home country.
Each of these charity campaigns promoted by
different UNICEF offices were explored in detail by the ESET Latin America
Laboratory, with the aim of making users more aware of this matter by providing
relevant information. Because behind the pioneering new concepts like
these, malicious campaigns always crop up that take advantage of the
novelty to deceive users.
Game Chaingers: UNICEF France Campaign to
Mine Ethereum and Help Syrian Children
The name “Game Chaingers” was strategically
chosen to include the word “chain”, which is a reference to the blockchain
technology that supports cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (the
one used in this program). This campaign can be viewed on the site chaingers.io, and is
aimed at eSports players, gamers, designers, and other users who have powerful
computers with high-performance graphics cards, since the Ethereum mining
process requires a lot of processing power.
The process of mining Ethereum for the
benefit of UNICEF is really simple, since the mining client (or miner) can be
downloaded with UNICEF’s wallet data preconfigured and based on your graphics
card model and operating system. Once the miner is downloaded, all you have to
do is run it via a shortcut to start mining.
However, taking this past campaign as an
example, there are some issues to be considered before you start donating your
resources. The first is the electrical consumption that this
generates. According to the UNICEF website, a computer with a standard graphics
card mining Ethereum consumes around 0.16 kWh, which is similar to the
consumption used when playing a high-quality video game. This consumption
should not be a problem if you only plan to donate a couple of hours a day, but
it is definitely something that must be calculated if you plan to leave the
miner running 24 hours a day.
It is also a known fact that intensively
using and overloading processors can eventually damage a computer or cause
some of its circuits to burn out. For this reason, you should
always consider the processing percentage and power that will be used for
mining.
And while UNICEF has clarified that the
amount of resources assigned can be configured to avoid overloads, the fact
remains that, by default, the miner is configured to use 100% of the processing
power.
Miner start-up script
This last image shows the values configured
in the miner at 100%. The parameters GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT and
GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT indicate the processing percentage of the graphics
card to be used, while GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE indicates the amount of memory. And
while these values can be edited within the script, changing them could be
cumbersome for some users who want to just run the file without taking such
precautions.
TheHopePage: UNICEF Australia’s Campaign to
Mine Monero and Help Refugee Children in Bangladesh
This is the current campaign launched by
UNICEF Australia, which aims to raise funds for Burmese children who are
refugees in Bangladesh as a result of the crisis. This campaign is aimed at all
users, since it uses Monero mining scripts through a browser.
To collaborate in this initiative, simply
visit the site TheHopePage.org and
click on the “Start Donating” button.
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