Decreasing Cryptojacking Following Coinhive Closure
According to Malwarebytes antivirus, mining cryptocurrencies by malwares has decreased 79% compared to this time last year.
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According to Malwarebytes antivirus, mining cryptocurrencies by malwares has decreased 79% compared to this time last year. Investigations by this security company show that the closure of Coinhive last month was the main reason for this drop.
Coinhive has always drawn the attention of the hackers through offering a Javascript code to mine Monero. When the user is visiting the website, this code starts mining Monero through being added to the content of the website. Therefore, without the user being informed, his/her system resources are used to mine these cryptocurrencies, and they are transferred to the attacker.
In the browser, Coinhive can reach 90 h/s (hash per second) in a system with Core i7 CPU. This rate reaches 140 h/s for a system which has been uniquely allocated to mine Monero. This nominal difference makes Monero an appropriate alternative to run Javascript code of mining through the browser, although this difference is very big for the other common cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Being economic mining Monero through Coinhive has impelled many of its advocates to design online websites and online videos in order to keep the user busy while saving necessary time to mine Monero through this Javascript code in the website.
As Coinhive application grows especially by cryptojacking developers, many antivirus companies decide to block this code as malware and avoid its running in the user system.
However, the growth of Coinhive in 2017 and 2018 faced a sharp drop in this year such that according to MelorBites, blocking this code decreased from tens of millions of times a day to two million times a day. The reason of this high decrease is the value drop of Monero from about $500 in its summit to about $62 at the present time. This price decrease has caused Monero mining lacking economic sense.
McAfee and Symantec antiviruses, too, have informed about decreasing cryptojacking attacks in separate reports. Charles McFarland, one of McAfee researchers, in a talk with PC Mag has mentioned Monero’s popularity and its value decrease as the main reasons for this drop. In his belief, main miners with lots of resources have limited smaller miners like Coinhive.
Similar versions to Coinhive such as CoinIMP and CryptoLoot have been developed and published recently. According to Check Point security company, in the absence of Coinhive, CryptoLoot succeeded in catching the first rank of crytpojacking tools. These versions infected the user’s system through targeting browsers in the file form via file downloading sites and Torrent and apply the user’s system to mine Monero as soon as it runs. Such tools are attempting to make up Monero’s value drop to some extent through relatively raising the hash rate. The experts believe that Monero value regrowth can cause Coinhive to become active again.
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