A Coinhive user hacked BlackBerry Mobile website to mine Monero coins before the scam was identified and details of which were published on Reddit.

The sudden surge in Bitcoin’s price has motivated people to mine cryptocurrencies and hope to become a millionaire within no time. It is true that there are legal ways of mining cryptocurrencies, but some would choose a quick and wrong way.

BlackBerry Mobile Site and Coinhive

Now, a 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’s post on Wednesday, January 6th, 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. Here is a screenshot shared by Reddit user:

How did that happen?

At the time of publishing this article, the malicious code was removed from the site and HackRead can confirm that BlackBerry Mobile website was compromised to place Coinhive code, which should not come as a surprise since there have been several cases in which hackers hijacked websites and added Coinhive mining 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 according to CloudFlare is considered as using malware against unsuspected users.

How was BlackBerry Mobile website hacked?

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.

“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,” said Coinhive.

Not for the first time

This is not the first time when Coinhive’s code was misused. Previously, Starbucks’s Argentina website was hacked to place Coinhive code to generate Monero. The researchers also identified 5,000 WordPress websites that are currently hijacked and secretly using the Coinhive code, however, this campaign is not limited to websites only; in fact, in October last year, three apps on PlayStore were caught using Coinhive code to mine Monera through Android devices.

How to block cryptocurrency miners from using your CPU power

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 open to the public, users can check out the source code on Github here and here.