BlackBerry Ltd. is the latest victim of cryptocurrency-loving hackers in the latest of a rash of cryptomining hijacking cases.
The mobile website for BlackBerry was discovered by a Reddit user last week to be serving up code to visitors from Coinhive, the notorious Monero mining script service. The same person who discovered the code did note that it was only the global Blackberrymobile.com site that was affected, not country-specific sites. However, the code has been removed, so that couldn’t be confirmed.
Coinhive itself chimed in on Reddit, saying that one of its users had hacked Blackberry’s website using a vulnerability in the Magento webshop software. “We’re sorry to hear that our service has been misused,” the company said. “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.”
BlackBerry is far from the first company to be targeted by cryptomining code, and it won’t be the last. The first outbreaks of cryptomining-related hacking occurred in September, when The Pirate Bay and then Showtime were exposed as using the method. As cryptocurrencies boomed, so instances of hackers and site owners trying to cash in on Monero mining. A RiskIQ report Sept. 26 found that more than 1,000 sites were now hijacking the computing power of site visitors to mine for cryptocurrencies.
By October, leading content delivery network Cloudflare Inc. was the first major provider to crack down on the method, banning all sites from its network that have cryptocurrency mining code installed.
The method spread to apps later the same month, when the first reports emerged of Coinhive scripts appearing in Android apps, and the new attack vector has seemingly continued to grow. Only this weekend, a security researcher discovered 291 apps across third-party Android stores that included the miming code, although they appear to be the same app and code with 291 different names.
Commenting on the Android outbreak, HackRead noted that though the biggest victims of cryptocurrency miners were previously website owners and unsuspecting visitors, now Android users are also at risk. The advice, as always, is to practice safe internet: Do not download unknown apps from Android stores, make sure they have up-to-date antivirus software installed and keep an eye on their processor usage because cryptocurrency miners trigger high usage.
