The few ruin it for the many!
The unwritten rule of life, a few bad apples spoil the bunch! How true it is!
It's true in life, Kindergarten there is the kid whose parents are selfish and never taught their ilk to share and to NOT they steal your toys, There are the criminals that think what you have is theirs.
In Crypto we have Crypto miners for example, they have always seeking ways to innovate and cut costs. Their latest actions have cost ramifications for all of us.
How so? There were a few generous web based CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Development) think of it as a software lifecycle offering, firms that gave away their free tier with just a user ID and password.
Although, Crypto mining abuse has caused that to change. Its not life altering, new accounts are required to provide a valid credit card when registering for an account.
What happened in detail?
Free service tiers have been abused to the tune of losing money and thus forcing heavy scrutiny of accounts and valid payment methods. One example, is it costing the service provide $50 worth of compute to mine $1 of Monero.
Not very efficient for any business owner.
Who has been impacted?
GitLab, Microsoft Azure, TravisCI, LayerCI, CircleCI, Render, CloudBees CodeShip, Sourcehut, and Others
What are they running?
Most have been caught running xmrig software of course there are others too
Change to terms and actions
On one end of the spectrum you have Microsoft ended its free pipelines for new CI/CD pipelines in Feb. '21, rather drastic but its their sandbox not mine.
And on the other you have firms updating Terms of Service (TOS) or the one that might just be the best approach, redefining free tier offering to not make Crypto mining cost effective
Are hackers getting the message?
Yes, blog and article snippets are turning up in Hacker News stories!
Summary
Don't go all TROLL on me, I have not said all Crypto miners are evil living off the free tier, just that Crypto miners are killing free CI offerings! Stealing is stealing regardless of platform!
