On December 21, Opera introduced cryptocurrency miner protection on its Android version.
The company reported that the new feature was built into the ad-blocker:
"The new anti-cryptocurrency mining feature is activated by default when you enable the ad blocker on Opera Mini (iOS and Android) or Opera for Android. The ad blocker can be enabled by going to 'settings', and it will automatically detect and stop the mining scripts written into the code of a webpage."
It's estimated that more than a billion devices are already affected by mining malware. It's almost impossible to discover that a miner uses a smartphone to mine digital money. Therefore, users usually have no idea about what's going on with their devices, why they get slower, and their batteries run out quicker.
Moreover, miner can easily overload a smartphone’s CPU and even cause physical damage to it. The business technology news website ZDNet gives a bright example of such case. According to its article, one Android trojan minered so aggressive the smartphone’s battery swelled up. The device was wrecked by malware within just 48 hours! Therefore, Opera's cryptocurrency mining protection proves to be very timely one.
Opera browser with the new feature is available for download from the Google Play Store.