Coinhive to shut down all its cryptojacking services on March 8!

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Coinhive, an in-browser Monero cryptocurrency miner, announced that it would be shutting down all its operations next week on March 8, 2019. Users will be given time until April 30th for withdrawing any remaining Monero from their accounts. Launched in 2017, Coinhive service provided ways to mine cryptocurrency in the background of a website, turning visitors’ processing power directly into cash.

The company in their blog post mentioned reasons for the service closure including the fall in the value of Monero over the past year. Coinhive said, “The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard. So did the ‘crash’ of the cryptocurrency market with the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year.

The company further mentions, “This and the announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has led us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.”

Security researcher Troy Mursch said, “Coinhive had market share of 62 percent in August 2018.” According to an academic paper, the company was making in an estimated $250,000 per month up until last summer, the ZDNet reports.

Jérôme Segura, malware researcher at Malwarebytes told ZDNet “While ‘cryptojacking’ or ‘drive-by mining’ dominated the threat landscape in late 2017 and early 2018, it took backseat for the rest of the year, with the notable exception of some campaigns powered by a large number of compromised IoT devices (i.e. MikroTik exploits).”

“Some sites were upfront with visitors about their use of the software, most notably the news website Salon and UNICEF, but countless others either didn’t disclose the fact they were using it or saw the Javascript code added without their knowledge as part of “cryptojacking” malware attack. Eventually, ad-blockers and anti-virus software learned to identify and block such code, so that users could avoid having their CPUs used and their batteries drained by the software”, The Verge reports.

To know more about the Coinhive closure in detail, head over to Coinhive’s official blog post.