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I NOW OWN THE COINHIVE DOMAIN. HERE'S HOW I'M FIGHTING CRYPTOJACKING AND DOING
GOOD THINGS WITH CONTENT SECURITY POLICIES.

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01 April 2021

If you've landed on this page because you saw a strange message on a completely
different website then followed a link to here, drop a note to the site owner
and let them know what happened. If, on the other hand, you're on this page
because you're interested in reading about the illicit use of cryptomining on
compromised websites and how through fortuitous circumstances, I now own
coinhive.com and am doing something useful with it, read on.

You know how people don't like ads? Yeah, me either (at least not the spammy
tracky ones that invade both your privacy and your bandwidth), but I also like
free content on the web and therein lies the rub; how do content producers
monetise their work if they can't put ads on pages? Well naturally, you
"Monetize Your Business with Your Users' CPU Power" which was Coinhives's modus
operandi. That's a link to the last snapshotted version on archive.org because
if you go to coinhive.com today, you'll see nothing. The website is dead.
However, it's now owned by me and it's just sitting there doing pretty much
nothing other than serving a little bit of JavaScript. I'll come back to that
shortly, let's return to the business model of Coinhive:

So, instead of serving ads you put a JavaScript based cryptominer on your
victi... sorry - visitors - browsers then whilst they're sitting there reading
your content, you're harvesting Monero coin on their machine. They're paying for
the CPU cycles to put money into your pocket - ingenious! But there were two
massive problems with this and the first one is probably obvious: it's a sleazy
business model that (usually unknowingly) exploits people's electricity bills
for the personal gain of the site operator. It might only be exploiting them a
little bit (how much power can an in-browser JS cryptominer really draw?), but
it still feels super shady. The second problem is that due to the anonymous
nature of cryptocurrency, every hacker and their dog wanted to put Coinhive on
any sites they were able to run their own arbitrary JavaScript on.

I'll give you a perfect example of that last point: in Feb 2018 I wrote about
The JavaScript Supply Chain Paradox: SRI, CSP and Trust in Third Party Libraries
wherein someone had compromised a JS file on the Browsealoud service and
injected the Coinhive script into it. In that blog post I included the code
Scott Helme had de-obfuscated which showed a very simple bit of JavaScript,
really just the inclusion of a .js file from coinhive.com and the setting of a
32-byte key. And that's all an attacker needed to do - include the Coinhive JS,
add their key and if they wished, toggle a few configurations. That's it, job
done, instant crypto!

And then Coinhive was gone. (Also - "the company was making in an estimated
$250,000 per month" - crikey!) The site disappeared and the domain stopped
resolving. Every site that had Coinhive running on it, either by the design of
the site owner or at the whim of a cryptojacker, stopped mining Monero. However,
it was still making requests to the domain but without the name resolving
anywhere, the only signs of Coinhive being gone were errors in the browser's
developer tools.

In May 2020, I obtained both the primary coinhive.com domain and a few other
ancillary ones related to the service, for example cnhv.co which was used for
their link shortener (which also caused browsers to mine Monero). I'm not sure
how much the person who made these available to me wants to share so the only
thing I'll say for now is that they were provided to me for free to do something
useful with. 2020 got kinda busy and it was only very recently that I was
finally able to come back to Coinhive. I stood up a website and just logged
requests. Every request resulted in a 404, but every request also went into a
standard Azure App Service log. And that's where things got a lot more
interesting.

Firstly, the high-level stats and as I was routing through Cloudflare, it was
super easy to look at the volume of requests first:

That's a substantial number of requests; peaking at 3.63M in a day for a service
that doesn't even exist anymore. But the number that really impressed me (if
"impressed" is the right word here...) was the number of unique visitors per
day:

Daaaamn! More than 2 years after Coinhive was gone and the miner is still
embedded in enough places to be serving more than 100k unique visitors per day.
Whoa. I wonder where they're all coming from?

Just for context, Have I Been Pwned (which sees about 200k visitors per day) has
a geographical distribution as follows:

I'm loath to draw stereotypical conclusions about the association of hackers to
Russia and China, but it's a bit inescapable here. Later on, when I analysed the
various URLs that were injecting Coinhive, there was (anecdotally) a strong
presence of Russian and Chinese websites.

Moving on, here's a typical log entry captured once I stood up the empty
website:

#Fields: date time s-sitename cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) cs(Cookie) cs(Referer) cs-host sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status sc-bytes cs-bytes time-taken

2021-03-27 02:59:32 COINHIVE GET /lib/coinhive.min.js X-ARR-LOG-ID=061e55e4-6380-4e88-a7f6-d4ea53071b71 443 - 172.69.166.8 Mozilla/5.0+(Linux;+Android+8.0.0;+ATU-LX3)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/88.0.4324.181+Mobile+Safari/537.36 ARRAffinitySameSite=0e2a05ba3fa8945356c52a5d6a03ef6078571b96359db7d489b1580040a9fdec https://lookedon.com/ coinhive.com 404 0 2 470 1424 15

The JS file being requested is how Coinhive was usually embedded in a site. The
IP is Cloudflare's (remember, they're a reverse proxy so it's their IP the
website receives) and the response code is 404 as there was no resource to
return. The referrer is the interesting one because this tells us where the
script was requested from, in this case a website at lookedon.com. A quick
glance at that site at the time of writing and yeah, that's a cryptominer in the
HTML source:

Before we go any further delving into the ins and outs of cryptominers, I
strongly recommend watching this video by Hugo Bijmans and Christian Doerr from
the Delft University of Technology presenting at the USENIX Security Symposium a
couple of years ago. It's only 21 minutes long and it gets straight to the
point:

There's also a much more comprehensive paper from Hugo and colleagues titled
Inadvertently Making Cyber Criminals Rich: A Comprehensive Study of
Cryptojacking Campaigns at Internet Scale. If you want to go much deeper, have a
good read through this. (Incidentally, I've been in touch with Hugo and we're
discussing how to best use the data I'm logging for both research and defensive
purposes.)

I pulled down several days of logs beginning 2021-03-27 and imported them into a
DB where I could analyse things more easily (8.9M rows in total). I looked
firstly at the content that was being requested (all subsequent figures exclude
the cnhv.co link shortener domain unless otherwise stated):

The prevalence of the JavaScript miners is no surprise, and the Delft guys talk
about the role of the WebAssembly (.wasm) in their paper. There were references
to WASM in the original Coinhive script, but of course nobody has been loading
that for quite some time so I can only assume it's being embedded by other
means. The logs don't have a referrer on any of the WASM entries either so it's
not clear where the requests are originating from:

2021-03-27 02:59:42 COINHIVE GET /lib/cryptonight.wasm X-ARR-LOG-ID=3aebf86b-116e-4ce6-a8a5-2c3d9911a2c4 443 - 162.158.167.112 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+10.0;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+apollohobo/1.0.0+Chrome/58.0.3029.110+Electron/1.7.9+Safari/537.36 - - coinhive.com 404 0 2 470 1205 15

I put this to Hugo and he made the following comment:

> When the coinhive.min.js script was downloaded from the original Coinhive
> server, it analyzed the target system, determined the number of CPU threads
> available and afterwards downloaded that WASM file to be distributed amongst a
> number of WebWorkers (often the same number of threads available). That WASM
> file is where the actual mining is taking place, as WebAssembly can be
> executed almost as fast as native machine code. The name of that particular
> WASM file changed a few times in the past, which explains why there is a
> variation of Wasm files requested. Some websites serve the coinhive.min.js
> script from their own server (to prevent detection), but the WebWorkers will
> still request the WASM file from the original Coinhive domain, as the JS
> script has barely changed.

Next up is the referrer, but due to there being many different paths on the same
site serving the miner, I grouped by host and reported on that:

I found more than 41k unique domains in the referrer header. That's many tens of
thousands of websites still attempting to embed Coinhive. Taking a look at
webtruyenonline.com (the root of the site featured heavily in the referrers),
the site is in Vietnamese but upon visiting it, I couldn't find any sign
whatsoever of Coinhive. Not in the page source, not requested from a downstream
dependency and not on other deeper links in the referrers either. Looking closer
at the log entries, a pattern emerged with the user agents, so I filtered those
out and grouped them:

They're all mobile devices. I changed the UA string I was sending to the first
one above and reissued the request, but there was still no Coinhive in the HTML
response. Is it tailoring the response based on the location of the requesting
IP? I connected NordVPN to Vietnam and tried again. Nothing. I even proxied my
own iPhone through Fiddler then VPN'd to Vietnam and still nothing. That's a
totally standard UA for Safari on iOS 14.4.1 too, so no clues there as to what
circumstances are causing these requests. Hugo also had some thoughts on this
one:

> During our follow-up research on cryptojacking, we discovered that 1.4M
> MikroTik routers were serving cryptojacking scripts as they were routing Web
> traffic, geographically focussed on Brazil and Indonesia. It could be that a
> Vietnamese MikroTik router is still infected and somehow manages to inject the
> script into that particular (popular) website.

I'll take this opportunity to make a quick call back to Here's Why Your Static
Website Needs HTTPS. Securing the transport layer isn't just about protecting
sensitive information, it's also about protecting the integrity of the content
and assuming Hugo is right here, this is a beautiful demonstration of the
necessity of HTTPS everywhere. More on this in their paper titled Just the Tip
of the Iceberg: Internet-Scale Exploitation of Routers for Cryptojacking.

The next host name at aahora.org, however, was a totally different story and
sure enough, there's Coinhive:

I don't intend to keep going through the top hits, the point is that the
presence of requests in the logs doesn't always map cleanly to the presence of
Coinhive on the site in the referrer. I can think of a variety of reasons for
this but suffice to say there were still a heap of sites attempting to embed a
cryptominer in the browser.

There was just one more thing I was interested in - what can we tell about
concerted cryptojacking campaigns based on the data? I mean how many of these
log entries were from sites running the same Coinhive key which would indicate
the same actor behind each site? So, I wrangled up a little crawler script and
started scraping each unique site looking for the presence of Coinhive. It's a
basic one (it merely looks for a Coinhive key in the HTML source so misses keys
embedded in another JS file or an iframe), but it's sufficient for my
requirements here. I crawled the first 375k URIs based on the most prevalent in
the logs, pulled back the keys and recorded the number of unique URIs and host
names they appeared on. I found over 3k unique keys, here's the top 10:

Doing a bit of Googling for the keys, I found 2 interesting things and the first
one relates to the second key ("FgW..."):



Well, that supports Hugo's earlier thesis. As prevalent as that key may be
having appeared on 103 unique hosts, it could just be a single infected router.
Further supporting the MikroTik theory was that every single URL was served
unencrypted over HTTP:

In this particular case there was a heavy bias towards "sahara" domains. These
relate to Subarta Roy, a name I only knew after recently watching the Netflix
series Bad Boy Billionaires, of which he is apparently one. Is there someone
within the corrupt billionaires org running an infected router that's
cryptojacking all their non-secure requests? I suspect that's just one of many
curious mysteries within the data set.

That third key - "w9W..." - has a Google hit that links directly back to the
Dutch research paper:

It's hard to draw any conclusion other than that there remains a large number of
compromised websites out there hosting Coinhive even now that Coinhive is dead.
They're no longer mining crypto, of course, however these sites are still
embedding JavaScript on them from a domain I control so...



The modal is embedded directly from script served by the site I stood up. The
link goes through to this blog post and the message can be easily dismissed by
folks who just want to browse the site. I thought carefully about this approach;
did I really want to modify other people's websites? I want site owners to know
there's a high likelihood they've been compromised, problem is how do you do
that otherwise when we're talking about tens of thousands of sites? I've done
enough disclosures over enough years to know that even doing this once is
painful, but if I was to write just a little bit of JavaScript instead...

Oh - and while we're here let's just let that sink in for a moment: I can now
run whatever JavaScript I want on a huge number of websites. So, what could I do
with JavaScript? I could change where forms post to, add a key logger, modify
the DOM, make external requests, redirect to a malicious file and all sorts of
other very nasty things. That's the power you hand over when you embed someone
else's JS in your own site and that's precisely why we have subresource
integrity. I linked earlier to my post on SRI as it related to the Browsealoud
incident and this situation right here is as good a demonstration as ever as to
why verifying the integrity of external assets is so important.

So, what's the fix? Well, it depends, and to answer that we need to go back to
the preso from Delft uni guys, in particular this slide:

If the miner is owner-initiated then firstly, shame on them, and secondly, just
remove it. If it was their conscious decision to embed the miner in the first
place, they can then remove it of their own free volition. But much more
prevalent than this is malicious activity, in fact it accounts for the vast
majority of instances once you consider both third-party software compromises
and compromises of the primary website itself:

The answer here is twofold, and the first part is obviously to either remove the
compromised code or third-party library then, of course, fix the underlying
vulnerability (i.e. change weak admin credentials that allowed it to be placed
on the site in the first place). But we also have the technology to ensure the
crypto code could never have run on the site in the first place, and that brings
me back to CSPs.

Let's take one of the most commonly occurring websites in my logs, lookedon.com.
This service enables you to "find interesting pictures" and like most modern web
sites, it embeds all sorts of content types from different places by design. For
example, there's a bunch of the following:

 1. Images loaded from pbs.twimg.com
 2. Script loaded from connect.facebook.net
 3. Fonts from fonts.gstatic.com
 4. Other content from its own domain, for example style sheets and more images

There are other content types loaded from other locations but for the sake of
simplicity, let's just work with this list for now. Using a content security
policy, I can define the content types and locations the browser is allowed to
make requests to and anything that deviates from that known good state is
blocked. Here's what a policy for the 4 points above would look like:

default-src 'none'; img-src 'self' pbs.twimg.com; script-src-elem connect.facebook.net; font-src: fonts.gstatic.com; style-src 'self';

The CSP is then returned as a response header for any pages on the website. I
can emulate this behaviour by injecting it into the site with FiddlerScript then
inspecting the response in Chrome's dev tools:

Nothing is allowed to load from anywhere (default-src 'none') then only the
explicitly defined content types are allowed to load from the explicitly defined
locations. As such, here's what happens when the browser is asked to embed the
Coinhive script:

It's rejected. There's only one place this website can embed scripts from and
that's connect.facebook.net. What we're doing here is creating an "allow list"
of all the things that we as the website developer know to be good, and then
allowing the browser to block everything else. Someone drops a crypto miner on
your site via any of the methods mentioned above and wammo! Nothing happens 😊

But wait, there's more: wouldn't it be great to know when this happens? In the
Browsealoud situation from earlier, I'd love to know as soon as a third-party
service or library I depend on starts doing something unexpected. And I'd
especially like to know if someone drops malicious script onto my own site, so
let's tweak the CSP a bit:

default-src 'none'; img-src 'self' pbs.twimg.com; script-src-elem connect.facebook.net; font-src: fonts.gstatic.com; style-src 'self'; report-uri https://troyhunt.report-uri.com/r/d/csp/enforce;

All I've added here is the report-uri directive right at the end and this brings
me to... Report URI!



Full disclosure: Report URI is a service Scott and I run together and there's a
bunch of both free and commercial stuff. But having said that, what I'm about to
delve into is equally applicable whether you use our service or stand up your
own reporting endpoint; this is about the browser technology rather than a
product pitch. (And yes, we know report-uri is deprecated but it's supported
extensively unlike report-to which is still patchy, but we own the domain name
anyway 🙂)

When you use the report-uri feature in a content security policy, violations in
the policy can be automatically sent to an endpoint of your choosing. In the
example above I have my own subdomain on report-uri.com and I've configured that
host as the location my visitors' browsers should send any violation reports.
Subsequently, when we test this on lookedon.com we see the following report sent
by the browser:

Imagine that you as the person responsible for this site received the violation
report above; it tells you that the document-uri (the root of lookedon.com)
tried to embed the blocked-uri (the Coinhive JS file) and that it violated the
effective-directive that is "script-src-elem". In other words, someone is trying
to put Coinhive on your site, but the browser has blocked it and you've just had
this report personally delivered to you. Neat! Put a CSP on your site and report
violations, it's one of the best defences going for a whole bunch of typical web
attacks.

Last thing: the code that now runs on coinhive.com is available on GitHub and
I'm happy to take pull requests. I'd love it if folks could work out a way to
serve something useful in response to the WASM requests and I'm certainly open
to any suggestions re cleaning up that JS or doing anything else useful to help
both individuals and site owners alike. And no, don't tell me to just put my own
cryptominer in there 🙂

Edit: Less than half a day after publishing this, I received a pull request with
a full WASM implementation that will show the same message to any browser
directly calling a .wasm file. Massive thanks to Chad Baxter for doing this!

Security CSP Report URI
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TROY HUNT

Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, create courses for Pluralsight and am a
Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and
training technology professionals





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TROY HUNT

Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, run "Have I Been Pwned" and am a Microsoft
Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training
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