Coinhive Tries to Appease Critics With Opt-in Crypto Miner

[grimm]

Coinhive has come up with a new version of its controversial cryptocurrency miner after some ad blockers and antivirus companies decided to block the company's program.

A controversial cryptocurrency miner that can secretly hog your PC's processing power is getting a new version that comes clean about the service's intentions.

However, one security researcher said the effort will do little to stop the miner from being abused.

The company behind the miner, Coinhive, released a new version on Monday that won't activate without the user's consent. This comes amid ongoing concerns that the company is promoting a kind of invasive adware.

Coinhive designed the service as a way to help websites generate revenue and provide an "ad-free experience." To do so, the company's program mines the digital currency Monero by borrowing the CPU processing power from any user that visit the target website.

The problem is that at least some Coinhive customers have been incorporating the miner without telling their users. This happened last month when The Pirate Bay, a website affiliated with online piracy, began secretly testing it. As a result, visitors to certain webpages on The Pirate Bay noticed huge spikes in CPU resource usage, prompting complaints.

Hackers are also hurting the miner's reputation, too. Last week, a malicious actor placed the Coinhive code into a political fact-checking site, which briefly began siphoning high amounts of computing power from users who visited the page. In response, Coinhive terminated the hacker's account. It's also asking that customers use the miner in a transparent manner.

"We believe that it is essential to be honest to the website visitors for the long term success of our service," Coinhive said in an email on Tuesday.

"We also underestimated the amount of misuse that would happen when we launched Coinhive, especially with the implementation of our service on 'hacked' websites," the company added.

The new version of Coinhive's miner, called AuthedMine, will instead serve an opt-in screen, asking users for permission to borrow their computing power.

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In a blog post, Coinhive also noted that some ad blockers and antivirus programs have begun blocking the company's miner, which can embed itself in a website as Javascript. Coinhive hopes this new version will gain wider acceptance, and won't be treated as a form of malicious code.

But that doesn't mean the old version of Coinhive's miner is going away. "Our previous solutions will continue to work exactly as they did," the company said.

Independent security researcher Troy Mursch has a different take: "So in other words nothing has changed," he said. Mursch has been following Coinhive and said the company had acted "too little, too late."

Even without Coinhive, other providers are starting to copy the company's idea and offer their own cryptocurrency miners that won't require users to first opt-in. "Great idea, poorly implemented and rapidly abused," Mursch said.

AdGuard, an ad-blocking service, said last week it's so far found 220 websites using a cryptocurrency miner to generate revenue from their visitors. Many of these sites offer porn or pirated content and tend to struggle to find legitimate ad revenue.

However, time will tell if cryptocurrency miners like Coinhive's will grow even more in popularity, despite some of the controversy.