Pierluigi Paganini February 28, 2019

The popular in-browser cryptocurrency mining service
Coinhive has announced that it will shut down on March 8, 2019.

The service made the headlines across the years because it was used by crooks to abuse computational resources of the victims that were visiting compromised websites hosting the Coinhive script.

Coinhive was initially launched as a legitimate service for site administrators to generate revenue from the traffic visiting their websites.

Security firms spotted several hacking campaigns aimed at compromising websites to install JavaScript-based Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency mining scripts and monetize their efforts.

When unaware users visit compromised websites, the script starts using their computers’ processing power to mine cryptocurrency.

The company explained its decision with a statement published on its website, it argued that the mining process via internet browsers is no longer “economically viable.”

“We will discontinue our service on March 8, 2019. It has been a blast working on this project over the past 18 months, but to be completely honest, it isn’t economically viable anymore.” reads the announcement published by Coinhive.

“The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard. So did the “crash“ of the crypto currency market with the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year. This and the announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has lead us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.”

Users’ dashboards will remain accessible until April 30, 2019 to allow users to withdraw the funds from their accounts if they are above the minimum payout threshold.

Cyber criminal organizations abused the service in many campaigns, in response to their fraudulent activities tech giants started banning Coinhive scripts. Last year, Google banned all cryptocurrency mining extensions from its Chrome Web Store and Apple also banned cryptocurrency mining apps from the official app store.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Coinhive, hacking)

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