Report: Fraudulent Monero Mining Generates $100K Per Month for Hackers

A German university released a cryptocurrency mining-centric report, Aug. 14, noting a rise in revenue generated by illegal mining software, despite the fall in "Cryptojacking."

As reported by Digital Trends, RWTH University in Aachen, Germany, has presented a detailed account of the infamous, browser-based miner Coinhive being used to produce over $250,000 worth of Monero per month for attackers, as per trading value denoted by CryptoSlate at the time of writing.

Developed to be a social good, the Coinhive miner was initially introduced to crypto-enthusiasts to allow them to exchange their extra computing power for access to mine the Monero network.

Hackers have configured Coinhive to send a user's mined Monero to their own digital wallets by hacking websites and secretly installing the code.

Interestingly, the Coinhive miner accounts for 1.8 percent of Monero's hashing power, with a majority of mining incentives realized for nefarious purposes.

At the time of writing, Monero is trading at $89.28, signifying a $113,474 profit for hackers in a month of fraudulent mining.

The research also claims that only 10 wallet addresses received a chunk of the fraudulently mined Monero.

For research purposes, the university team ran a "WebAssembly" script to detect web-based mining software running on the internet.

Scan results showed a clear dominance of Coinhive, which accounted for 75 percent of mining usage.

The JavaScript-based Coinhive proves to be an easy target for hackers around the world due to its choice of programming language, and attackers have deployed the open-source mining software to a diverse range of victims-including government websites, corporations and even the San Diego Zoo.Cover Photo by Mark Harrison on Unsplash.