A Coinhive user has allegedly hacked the BlackBerry Mobile website to mine Monero coins before the scam was identified and details published on Reddit.
It would appear that only BlackBerry Mobile’s global english site is affected, meaning that anyone getting redirected to CA, EU, US, etc won’t have the coinhive miner running while the site is open.
Reddit user Rundvleeskroket has revealed that the official website of BlackBerry Mobile was caught using Coinhive’s cryprocurrency code to mine Monero digital coins by taking advantage of user’s computing power.
According to Rundvleeskroket, it was their friend who pointed out that Blackberry Mobile domain (blackberrymobile.com), which is a trading name used by TCL Communication to sell BlackBerry-branded devices around the world, was using Coinhive code.
CoinHive is a company that provides cryptocurrency miner and sends any coins mined to the browser of the websites’ owner. Currently, there are thousands of websites using Coinhive’s code and secretly generating Monero which is considered as using malware against unsuspected users.
Coinhive also commented on the Reddit post and revealed that BlackBerry Mobile website was compromised by a Coinhive user after exploiting a critical security flaw in Magento webshop software. The same user hacked several other sites to place the malicious code and therefore their account was terminated.
Coinhive commented,
“We’re sorry to hear that our service has been misused. This specific user seems to have exploited a security issue in the Magento webshop software (and possibly others) and hacked a number of different sites.
We have terminated the account in question for violating our terms of service now,”
Currently, there are limited options to block cryptocurrency miners from using your computer powers. Some of the options that can be used are
1: Opera 50 beta version, the browser comes with a builtin cryptocurrency mining blocker.
2: No Coin and minerBlock extensions on Chrome web store developed to block any crypto miners from using your computing power.
Both extensions are open source and available to the general public. You can check out the source code on Github here and here.
