The market is down, and the malicious mining software Coinhive is going bankrupt

According to the official blog of Coinhive, Coinhive will cease operations on March 8 due to economic unfeasibility, and the user's dashboard will be available before April 30, 2019.

Affected by the decline in the cryptocurrency market, Monero (XMR) has fallen 85% in a year. The blog also mentioned that after the last Monero hard fork, the decline in hash rate (more than 50%) hit it hard, and on the upcoming March 9, Monero will undergo another hard fork and algorithm update. "All this led us to conclude that we need to stop Coinhive."

Coinhive was launched on September 14th. It is a javascript-based digital currency mining service that currently only supports Monero. Once the computer code is successfully installed on a website, the service will use part of the computing power of the browser that loads the relevant site. Although Coinhive itself is not a malicious code, it has become a popular tool for hackers to occupy web traffic for mining. When promoting Coinhive to webmasters, the author claimed that webmasters could make a profit by loading Coinhive JS: it only consumes a small part of the CPU of visiting users, and can earn profits for website owners to support their business, without having to add various annoying advertisements.

But Coinhive JS soon spread rapidly on various websites. According to the Global Threat Index released by Check Point at the end of January, despite the overall decline in the value of all cryptocurrencies in 2018, crypto mining malware still occupied the top three of the list at the end of last year. Among them, Coinhive has maintained the first position for the 13th consecutive month, affecting 12% of organizations worldwide.

Last August, a new study conducted by German researchers found that the browser mining software Coinhive remained profitable despite the continued bearish market this year, earning $250,000 worth of Monero in a month through mining. It is estimated that Coinhive will also mine 1.18% of all Monero blocks, with a median hash rate of 5.5M h/s.

From ticket grabbing software to various apps, Coinhive has taken over. On February 15, the security company Symantec published an article on its official website saying that it found 8 malicious apps in the Microsoft Store in January. These apps came from three developers, DigiDream, 1clean and Findoo, covering computer and battery optimization tutorials, network search, web browsing, video viewing and downloading, etc. The apps were implanted with Coinhive scripts, which can hijack the user's CPU to mine Monero. After receiving the Symantec report, Microsoft has now deleted these apps.

Monero will undergo a scheduled protocol upgrade on March 9, aiming to perform a hard fork at a block height of 1788000. According to Feixiaohao, XMR's market capitalization currently ranks 13th, with a price of $48.2.