Customer’s Laptop Hacked Through Starbucks Wi-Fi to Mine Cryptocurrency

The growing popularity of cryptocurrency among investors has swayed a lot of miners to mine digital currencies. Crypto mining recently is said to have one of the most lucrative options to earn handsomely. But the sad thing is that crypto mining activities require high-end and expensive computing machines which are usually not affordable to an average miner.

The crypto mania is so big that miners have now resolved to some crazy activities of hacking laptops and using the machine power to mine cryptocurrency. In one such bizarre and unsettling incident, a suspicious activity of using a customer’s laptop was discovered in a Starbucks cafe in Argentina.

Earlier this month, Stensul CEO Noah Dinkin noticed an interesting activity of a 10-second delay to connect to a public in-store Wi-Fi at Starbucks store in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Further investigating into the matter, Dinkin found a suspicious code embedded in Starbucks' reward site. Later he discovered that it was Coinhive’s code which is used to mine Monero coins by using the processing power of the site’s visitor.

Without any hesitation, Dinkin thought of getting this to the notice of Starbucks and quickly tweeted with the screenshot of the code.

Later, hacked.com too investigated into this matter and found that the code was indeed a Coinhive code used to generate Monero coins. But hacked.com believes that the Wi-Fi provider (the Starbucks store at Argentina) is not the culprit and the code has not been deliberately inserted. Rather this activity must have been done by cybercriminals who have inserted such codes across 5000 websites on the web.

Starbucks seems to have quickly taken cognizance of this matter and has restored the Wi-Fi connection back making it safe for use again. Starbucks tweeted:

In a word with Motherboard Starbucks spokesperson - Reggie Borges said "Last week, we were alerted to the issue and we reached out to our internet service provider – the Wi-Fi is not run by Starbucks, it's not something we own or control. We want to ensure that our customers are able to search the internet over Wi-Fi securely, so we will always work closely with our service provider when something like this comes up. We don't have any concern that this is widespread across any of our stores.”

The hacking community has been quite active with the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies. Recently, Coinhive - who offers JavaScript miner for the Monero Blockchain was a victim of hacking where its DNS servers were reportedly hijacked. The hackers changed the settings of the server and redirected the generated cryptocurrency to a third-party-server. However, not much information came to surface about any data being lost in the hacking attempt.