Hackers Favorite CoinHive Cryptocurrency Mining Service Shutting Down

Regular readers of The Hacker News already know how Coinhive’s
service helped cyber criminals earn hundreds of thousands of
dollars by using computers of millions of people visiting hacked
websites.
^[1]

For a brief recap: In recent years, cybercriminals leveraged every
possible web vulnerability [in Drupal, WordPress, and
others] to hack
thousands of websites and
wireless routers, and then modified them to secretly inject
Coinhive’s JavaScript-based Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency mining
script on web-pages to financially benefit themselves.

Millions of online users who visited those hacked websites
immediately had their computers’ processing power hijacked, also
known as cryptojacking^[6], to mine cryptocurrency
without users’ knowledge, potentially generating profits for
cybercriminals in the background.

Now, while explaining the reason to shut down in a note ^[7] on its website
yesterday, the Coinhive team said mining Monero via internet
browsers is no longer “economically viable.”

“The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard
fork hit us hard. So did the ‘crash’ of the cryptocurrency market
with the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year,” the
service said.

“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.”

So users who have an account on Coinhive website with above the
minimum payout threshold balance can withdraw funds from their
accounts before April 30, 2019.

Though Coinhive was launched as a legitimate service for website
administrators to alternative generate more revenue from their
websites, its extreme abuse in cyber criminals
activities^[8] forced tech companies
and security tools to label it as “malware” or “malicious
tool.”

To prevent cryptojacking by browser extensions that mine digital
currencies without users’ knowledge, last year Google also banned
all cryptocurrency^[9]
mining extensions from its Chrome Web Store.

A few months after that Apple also banned all cryptocurrency
mining apps^[10] from its official app
store.

^[2][3][4][5]