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Infamous ‘cryptojacking’ service Coinhive will close down in March
Coinhive, the in-browser cryptocurrency mining service that is loved by hackers, is closing down.
Launched in 2017, Coinhive offers code that website owners can insert into their pages that forces visitors to mine for Monero, a cryptocurrency popular with hackers given its privacy features.
The company initially pitched the service as an alternative to advertising. Instead of showing ads, Coinhive users could earn Monero instead for every visitor they had to their website.
Websites using Coinhive inserted a JavaScript file on their pages that mines Monero inside a browser window. The more time users spent on a site using Coinhive, the more Monero they mined.
Citing a decline in the value of Monero, Coinhive said in a blog post Tuesday that it would shut down March 8.
“The drop in hash rate (over 50 percent) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard,” Coinhive owners said. “So did the ‘crash’ of the cryptocurrency market with the value of XMR depreciating over 85 percent 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.”
Initially pitched as a legitimate alternative to advertising, The Pirate Bay being one of its first users, Coinhive eventually ended up primarily used by hackers. Time and time again, the Coinhive script was used to make Monero by hackers who would insert the company’s script on sites to which they had illegally gained access. At one point, the Coinhive Monero mining script was even being embedded in malware that targeted Amazon.com Inc. devices.
Suffice to say, Coinhive’s demise will not be mourned by anyone except the occasional hacker. But its demise will not see the end of cryptojacking. Since the launch of Coinhive, various clone sites have emerged, the most prominent being CoinIMP.
First coming to prominence in November when it was used in a hacking attack against the Make-A-Wish Foundation, CoinIMP offers the same functions as Coinhive with added support for the Webcoin cryptocurrency.
Image: Coinhive
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