Differing from traditional money, cryptocurrencies are not issued by a central bank or authority. Instead, this digital asset can be produced by “mining,” a process that involves solving complex mathematical and cryptographic algorithms. Bitcoin is one of the most famous cryptocurrencies, and now requires exceptional computational power to be mined.
Cryptocurrencies were bound to trigger the interest of criminals and it wasn’t long before coin mining malware made an appearance and addressed the scalability and resource-intensive process by enrolling as many bots as possible for the common effort.
Other cryptocurrencies continued to come out, including Monero (XMR), which unlike Bitcoin, can be mined by average computers. Unsurprisingly, many malware authors jumped in to compromise new hosts to deliver Monero-based mining malware. An important milestone in the history of cryptomining happened around mid-September when a company called Coinhive launched a service that could start mining for Monero directly within a web browser using a simple JavaScript library.
To differentiate browser-based mining from other previous forms, many started to label these instances as JavaScript Miners or Browser Miners.
