The profitability of the mining of cryptocurrencies is reduced by the background of prevailing bear market extending over a year, however, alternative ways of mining coins are attracting increasing interest. So, according to the findings of a study conducted by scientists from Germany, code for mining Coinhive, actually — miner, the built-in browser, made a quarter of a million dollars by mining anonymous cryptocurrency Monero just 1 month.
The data obtained by researchers from the Rhine-Westphalian technical University of Aachen, confirmed that Coinhive miner written in Javascript that consume some CPU for mining altcoins while browsing the web pages, used by more than actively.
As you know, software is mining Monero (XMR) — a top crypto-currency with high anonymity, whose struggle against attempts to mine it using ASIC hardware has already led this year to a number of forkam.
According to the study, during the observation period lasting 4 weeks, the established scientists in the spring of this year, the miner generated 1 271 XMR, which is approximately $250 000. Even at the current rate of $89 amount is significant — more than $113 000.
The authors note: Coinhive mines of 1.18% of all Monero blocks with an average hasraton 5,5 Mh/s. Developers get 30% of the value of each coin and it is argued that a large part of the fee also goes to “a small group of people”.
Note, the code Coinhive who gained fame in 2017, was created as a tool for site owners that allows you to offer users the content without ads in exchange for use of their hardware for mining altcoins such as Monero.
However, how effective this is is debatable: a pleasant experience, due to the lack of annoying advertisements, spoils the fact that due to miner speed is significantly reduced. In addition, in the analysis of efficiency of mining on the built-in code as an alternative to financing through advertising should take into account other factors, such as shorter battery life of mobile devices, increased electricity bills and rapidly declining rates of cryptocurrencies.
It is known that this is not the only problem: hackers have long adapted to the code for the mining, trying to get their piece of the pie. So, hacking sites, including the official web pages of public institutions, with the aim of integrating code Coinhive and setup the necessary configurations for sending all coin to their wallets is not uncommon. Browser extensions and routers are increasingly the target of scams.
Analyzing the possibility of effective hashing-based browser as a new model of monetization of websites without dealing with advertisers, researchers from major German technical University were tested for the presence of code domains from Alexa Top 1M list as well .com .net and .org. They were able to confirm the use of software for mining browser based, but noted that the prevalence remain low code discovered less than 0.08% of sites.
Not satisfied with the results of the audit with the filter, No Coin — extension available in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, a group of scientists used an alternative technique based on fingerprints Webassembly, with the result that it was established that the popular block-list failed to identify up to 82% mining websites.
Using a new approach, the researchers came to the conclusion that currently Coinhive is the largest provider of this method of mining used by 75% of the sites where Melnitsa cryptocurrency. Of interest is the fact that the result of checking the forwarding service link code has been confirmed “the existence of several active users who created a large part of the references,” mainly focused on streaming and file-sharing services.
“In fact, 1/3 of all links created by only one user, and approximately 85% of all links created only 10 users,” said the study authors.
We will remind, in June in Japan brought the first criminal case against the miners, secretly mining Monero using code Coinhive.
