The chances of your internet browser getting hit with a sneaky cryptocurrency miner have apparently tanked.

Cryptomining-based attacks on consumers have dropped 79 percent in the last year—in part because top cryptocurrency miner provider Coinhive shut down in early March, antivirus provider Malwarebytes reported Thursday.

Coinhive's miner worked via a computer script that anyone could install on a website. If your browser encountered the script, the miner would siphon away your PC's processing power to generate a virtual currency called Monero. In response, many antivirus providers began blocking Coinhive's miner.

Malwarebytes now says its own antivirus product is no longer blocking as many cryptocurrency mining attempts. "We went from tens of millions of blocks to an estimated two million per day," researcher Jerome Segura said in an email.

Coinhive started in 2017 and quickly gained a reputation as a tool for hackers to generate money. They secretly placed Coinhive's mining script on legitimate websites and third-party browser extensions they had cracked.

But in February, Coinhive announced it was shutting down on March 8, citing the slumping cryptocurrency market and difficulties with mining Monero following a "hard fork" with the currency. A single Monero coin is now worth $62, down from the $400 value it reached in January 2018.

Nevertheless, Coinhive inspired some copycat services. "In-browser mining has decreased overall, but there are some contenders such as CryptoLoot and CoinIMP," Segura added. "The big difference though is that the vast majority of sites that are loading those miners are torrent portals, or file-hosting services, as opposed to compromised websites like we used to see in the past."

Credit: Symantec

Antivirus providers Symantec and McAfee have also noticed a drop in cryptocurrency mining attacks. "However the shutdown of Coinhive is not necessarily the driver," McAfee researcher Charles McFarland told PCMag in an email. "Issues stemming from the popularity of Monero, and declining mining profitability in general have likely played a much larger role in the decline of attacks.

"For example, Monero is battling custom, specialized miners taking up a large portion of the network and have forked their network in response," he added. "The specialized miners leave smaller miners, such as browsers, little room to profit."

A separate security firm, Check Point, has said that cryptocurrency miners still lead overall as the top malware threat; Coinhive alternative CryptoLoot ranks No. 1 on the list.

"Despite its closure, the Coinhive JavaScript code is still in place on many websites. No mining is taking place, but if the value of Monero increases significantly, it is possible that Coinhive may come back to life," Check Point said in a blog post.

Businesses also need to be on guard for unauthorized mining. Check Point has seen cases where cryptocurrency miners were found installed on cloud servers used by corporations. Due to the mining, which can sap computing resources, the businesses were forced to pay "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to the cloud server providers, Check Point said.

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