Coinhive mining pool stops working

Coinhive_com was often used to covertly inject miners into web pages and programs. For example, recently in the Microsoft Store catalog , eight programs with the Coinhive miner were found . Often, such miners were introduced to hacked sites. Just add one line of JS to someone else’s site - and all visitors begin to mine the Monero cryptocurrency, and the money is credited to your Coinhive wallet. Very comfortably. In recent years, Coinhive has become an indispensable tool for attackers. However, the sweet life ended: on February 26, the service announced the end of work. The corresponding statement is published in the official blog . The shutdown is scheduled for March 8.

“Some of you may have expected this, some will be surprised. Decision is made. We will stop service on March 8, 2019. Work on this project over the past 18 months has been explosive, but to be honest, it is no longer economically viable, the official blog said. - The drop in the hash rate (by more than 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard. The cryptocurrency market collapsed, and XMR depreciated by more than 85% over the year. For this reason, and also because of the hard fork announced on March 9 and the Monero network algorithm update, we came to the conclusion that Coinhive needs to be shut down. ”

Thus, mining stops on March 8, 2019. Coinhive writes that dashboards will be available until April 30, 2019, so you can order payments if the balance is above the minimum threshold.

“Thank you all for the wonderful time we spent together,” the blog post ends with these words.

Companies that specialize in information security have repeatedly called Coinhive one of the main threats to Internet users, since Coinhive miners are secretly installed on hacked sites, stealing the computing power on site computers and mobile devices.

The Coinhive pool was so popular that it accounted for up to 30% of all Monero mining, and when the unbridled abuse of this platform began, a peculiar conflict of interests arose. On the one hand, Coinhive responded to complaints from owners of hacked sites and even canceled cryptographic keys related to abuse. On the other hand, it did not fight too aggressively with attackers.

The problem was that after the key was revoked, the Coinhive code continued to mine, writes Brian Krebs. True, after an investigation of the mechanism of the pool by independent experts, Coinhive made structural changes to its platform in order to no longer benefit from this shadow practice.

Troy Mursh is the chief researcher at Bad Packets LLC, which for many years chronicled hacking of large sites, where Coinhive mining began after the hacking. He says that after these changes, mining has become much less attractive to attackers: "Most of these guys just moved the business to other mining pools that do not even charge such a high commission."

In a statement, Coinhive says the decision was made due to a serious drop in the value of major cryptocurrencies. In fact, in March 2018, Monero's price hit a historic high of $ 342 per coin, and today it costs less than $ 50.

The announcement said that only those users whose balance is higher than the withdrawal threshold can withdraw money. This means that a large number of accounts will be impossible to cash out. However, the minimum limit at Coinhive is quite humane: it is 0.02 Monero, which is approximately equal to $ 1.00.

“This means that Coinhive is going to keep almost all the coins from user accounts that have mined something below this threshold,” commented Troy Mursh. “Maybe just a few dollars or a few cents here or there, but that was always their business model.” They made a lot of money on their platform. ” With thousands of accounts, account balances can bring Coinhive potentially thousands of dollars.

A year ago, Brian Krebs conducted an investigationand found that Dominic Szablewski, a German programmer of Polish descent, who also founded the German-language site pr0gramm_com, was involved in the creation of Coinhive. Coinhive was originally launched as an experiment on this site.

In protest against the publication of the personal details of the site’s founder, the pr0gramm_com user community donated hundreds of thousands of euros to various cancer-fighting charities.