Coinhive mining pool stops working

The Coinhive_com service was often used for the hidden implementation of miners in web pages and programs. For example, recently in the Microsoft Store catalog found eight programs with an embedded miner Coinhive . Often these miners were introduced to hacked sites. It is enough to add one line of JS to a foreign 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 intruders. However, the sweet life is over: February 26 service announced the end of the work. The corresponding statement is published in the official blog . The trip is scheduled for March 8th.

“Some of you may have been expecting 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 fall of the hashrate (more than 50%) after the last hard forge Monero hit us hard. There was a collapse of the cryptocurrency market, and XMR for the year has depreciated by more than 85%. For this reason, and also because of the hard forks announced and announced on March 9, we came to the conclusion that Coinhive should be stopped. ”

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.
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“Thank you all for the wonderful time we spent together,” - this ends the blog post.

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 computing power on computers and mobile devices of site visitors.

Coinhive Poole was so popular that it accounted for up to 30% of all Monero mining, and when the rampant abuse of this platform began, a kind of conflict of interest arose. On the one hand, Coinhive responded to complaints from owners of hacked sites and even revoked the cryptographic keys associated with the abuse. On the other hand, it did not actively deal with intruders.

The problem was that after the key was canceled, the Coinhive code continued to mine, Brian Krebs writes . However, after investigating the pool’s work mechanism by independent experts, Coinhive made structural changes to its platform in order not to benefit from this shady practice.

Troy Mursh is the chief researcher at Bad Packets LLC, which for many years chronicled the hacking of major sites where Coinhive mining began after 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, which even do not even charge such a high commission."

In a statement, Coinhive said that the decision was made because of a serious fall in the value of the main cryptocurrencies. In fact, in March 2018, Monero cost reached a historic high of $ 342 per coin, and today costs less than $ 50.

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

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

A year ago, Brian Krebs conducted an investigation and found out that Dominic Szablewski, a German programmer of Polish origin, who also founded pr0gramm_com, a German programmer, 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 founder of the site, the pr0gramm_com user community donated hundreds of thousands of euros to various anti-cancer charities.