As per Coinhive’s announcement, the mining service will stop its operations on March 8, 2019. The users would be able to access their dashboards until April 30, 2019. Amongst other reasons, the developers point out the 50 percent drop in hash rate following the last Monero (XMR) hard fork, as a key issue.
“This and the announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has to lead us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.”
Just this month, the tech giant Microsoft removed eight Windows 10 applications from the official app store as the cybersecurity firm Symantec identified the presence of surreptitious XMR coin mining code. Further, they identified the strain of mining malware enclosed in the apps as being the web browser-based Coinhive XMR mining code.
Along with PC, smartphone users are targeted by unauthorized mining software and from the 2016 to 2018 period, these kinds of attacks reportedly increased by 9.5 percent.
