Coinhive, a notorious cryptocurrency mining service popular among hackers, is shutting down.
Mining the virtual currency Monero via people's internet browsers is no longer "economically viable," Coinhive said in a Tuesday blog post, in part because the cryptocurrency market has tanked. A single Monero is now worth only about $49, a huge drop from a year ago, when its value was around $400.
The developers behind Monero have also been tweaking the virtual currency's protocol, making it harder to mine. "The drop in hash rate (over 50 percent) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard," the company 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."
Although Coinhive marketed itself as a cryptocurrency mining provider, its software has also been classified as some of the most pervasive malware in the world. That's because hackers have been abusing the service since 2017, when Coinhive first launched as a novel way for websites to generate revenue.
Coinhive's cryptocurrency miner worked by siphoning away your PC's computing power over a browser to generate Monero. Customers installed it on a website and sat back as incoming visits translated into mined Monero. (Users, meanwhile, were hit by PC performance slowdowns.)
Hackers soon realized that they too could use the service. They created accounts with Coinhive and secretly slipped Coinhive's Javascript mining code into websites they had breached. Anyone could sign up with the service, so it wasn't long before the hackers spread Coinhive's mining code to hundreds of websites, in addition to Google Chrome extensions and YouTube ads.
In response, Coinhive routinely claimed it was shutting down accounts found engaging in bad behavior. However, the company refrained from adding new safeguards or ID checks to stop cybercriminals from using its service. Coinhive may have had little financial incentive to do so; the company was taking a 30 percent cut from all the Monero it mined.
Coinhive's business also inspired a number of copycats, which led to a boom in browser-based mining malware. For the month of January, security firm Check Point said the top four malware variants were all related to cryptocurrency mining, with Coinhive sitting at the top.
However, security researcher Troy Mursch told PCMag the attacks have been trending downward on the falling price of Monero. "The money is simply not there anymore," he said. "The amount of cryptojacking detections (such as hacked websites) have declined greatly."
Coinhive, which is based in Germany, will pull the plug on its in-browsing mining service on March 8. Users who had accounts with the company will be able to cash out until April 30, unless their total balance is under $1 in Monero.