Mine

Overview

CoinMiner:Win32/Mine (also tracked under generic 'Miner' heuristics) represents a massive class of malware designed to secretly hijack the processing power (CPU and GPU) of infected endpoints to mine cryptocurrency (most commonly Monero) for the financial benefit of the attacker.

Understanding Cryptominers
To an end-user, the infection manifests as a sluggish, overheating computer with constantly spinning fans and terrible battery life. For a security analyst, unauthorized cryptomining ('Cryptojacking') is a severe resource hijacking event that drastically increases cloud compute costs, wears out hardware, and indicates a critical failure in perimeter security. Attackers frequently use automated worms or exploit internet-facing vulnerabilities to drop miners on hundreds of servers simultaneously.

Execution and Hijacking Mechanics
Miners are often deployed as secondary payloads by botnets (like Mirai or Sefnit) or via lateral movement using stolen credentials (`T1078`). Upon execution, the payload establishes persistence via WMI event subscriptions (`T1546.003`) or Scheduled Tasks (`T1053.005`). To evade detection, the miner frequently utilizes 'Process Hollowing' (`T1055.012`), injecting the mining engine (often a customized version of the open-source XMRig) into a legitimate Windows process (like `notepad.exe` or `svchost.exe`). The injected process then begins massive mathematical calculations (`T1496`), communicating exclusively via the Stratum protocol (`T1071`) to a remote mining pool to receive work and submit hashes.

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The impact is extreme resource degradation, potential hardware failure, and massive electricity/cloud billing spikes. The primary IoC is sustained, 100% CPU/GPU utilization by an unexpected process, or a legitimate process (like `svchost.exe`) consuming massive amounts of CPU without a clear reason. Network logs will reveal persistent outbound connections on unusual ports (like 3333, 4444, or 7777) to known cryptocurrency mining pools.

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

Observed techniques used by this family, mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework:

Tactical Mitigations

Based on the techniques used by this family, consider the following defensive strategies:

• T1071: Monitor network traffic for anomalous application layer protocols like non-standard HTTP/S patterns or unexpected DNS requests.

Generated Detections (Boilerplate)

These YARA and Sigma rules are auto-generated based on the family name and aliases. They must be heavily tuned before deployment in a production environment.

YARA Rule

rule MALWARE_WIN_MINE {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Mine (advanced_threat)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "mine" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Mine Activity
id: 918b81db5e91d031548b963c93845e5b
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the mine malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*mine*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

Ordered checklist for responders. Adapt to your environment and engage professional support for active incidents.

1. Isolate the endpoint to sever the connection to the mining pool and halt the resource drain.
2. Use EDR or Process Explorer to identify the heavily utilizing process; if it's a legitimate Windows binary, assume it has been hollowed out/injected.
3. Block the mining pool IP addresses and domains at the enterprise firewall.
4. Investigate the initial vector: If a server was infected, review external-facing web application logs for recent exploitation attempts (e.g., Log4Shell, WebLogic exploits).

What to Avoid

Common mistakes during response to this family that can destroy evidence, spread the infection, or worsen recovery.

1. Do not simply kill the process; most modern miners use a secondary 'watchdog' service to immediately restart the mining engine if it is terminated.
2. Avoid ignoring the alert as a 'low priority' PUA; if an attacker can deploy a miner, they can just as easily deploy ransomware.

References & External Analysis

• Search "mine" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: advanced_threat)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Filerepmetagen
• Rontokbr
• Nspm
• Fakesysdef
• Opriupdater

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordan123234-malware-families-explorer.static.hf.space/api/mine.json

Ecosystem & Interactive Environments

This profile is part of the Malware Families Catalog, a public dataset of 2,899 malware families. The catalog is also published across our ecosystem: Hugging Face, Kaggle, Zenodo, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.