From tripwire.com
If you think back to last year, Coinhive was everywhere. The service offered any website an arguably legitimate way of generating income that didn’t rely upon online adverts.
And plenty of well-known sites, such as Showtime, Salon.com and The Pirate Bay, were happy to give it a go.
Rather than making money through ads that might irritate you or track your online activity, a small piece of Javascript embedded on a webpage would gobble up the resources of visiting computers to mine some Monero cryptocurrency. Coinhive, as providers of the service, took a percentage of the earnings, while the website operators could keep the rest.
Predictably, criminals saw an obvious opportunity to make money. They took advantage of sloppy security, hacking websites to earn an easy crust.
In one infamous case, thousands of government websites in the UK and United States — including the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and USCourts.gov — were simultaneously hijacked to run Coinhive