Comine

Overview

Coinminer:Win32/Comine (or Trojan:Win32/Comine) is a malicious cryptomining application designed to silently hijack the CPU and GPU resources of infected systems. Its sole purpose is to generate cryptocurrency (most commonly Monero) for the attacker, operating entirely in the background without the victim's knowledge or consent (`T1496`).

Understanding Comine (Cryptominers)
To an end-user, a Comine infection manifests as severe system sluggishness. The computer's fans may spin loudly even when idle, the battery drains rapidly, and applications take unusually long to load. For an IT department, cryptominers are a significant drain on corporate resources, increasing electricity costs, shortening hardware lifespans due to thermal stress, and disrupting business operations due to resource starvation.

Execution and Resource Hijacking
Comine is often distributed via exploit kits, dropped by other malware (like botnets or downloaders), or bundled with pirated software. Upon execution, it establishes persistence, often via Scheduled Tasks or WMI event subscriptions. It drops the mining binary (often a modified, obfuscated version of XMRig). To evade detection, it often uses Process Hollowing (`T1055.012`), injecting the mining code into a legitimate process like `notepad.exe` or `svchost.exe`. It may also monitor Task Manager (`taskmgr.exe`) and temporarily pause mining when the user opens it, attempting to hide the CPU spike (`T1562.001`).

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The impact is primarily financial (electricity costs) and operational (hardware degradation). Host-based IoCs include persistent 90-100% CPU/GPU utilization by seemingly legitimate processes, rapid battery drain, and EDR alerts for process injection. Network IoCs are highly distinct: continuous outbound connections using the Stratum protocol (often over ports 3333, 4444, or 8080) communicating with known cryptocurrency mining pools.

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

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

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_COMINE {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Comine (trojan)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "comine" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Comine Activity
id: 6a0ae7e365a3b0bfeba0cf2cb8414e73
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the comine malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*comine*"
    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 infected machine; while the miner itself just steals resources, it was likely dropped by a more dangerous backdoor that still provides access.
2. Use EDR or Process Explorer to identify the specific process consuming the CPU cycles and terminate it.
3. Analyze network logs to identify the mining pool IP addresses and block them at the perimeter firewall to neutralize the attacker's monetization.
4. Audit the system for hidden persistence mechanisms, particularly WMI event subscriptions or obscure Scheduled Tasks.

What to Avoid

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

1. Do not assume the threat is minor; the presence of a miner proves that an attacker had arbitrary code execution capabilities on that machine.
2. Avoid relying solely on Task Manager to spot the miner, as advanced variants actively hide from it.

References & External Analysis

• Search "comine" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: trojan)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Gamsoft
• Moonpie
• Shelma
• Bredolab
• Vstoolbar

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordanricky1604-ship-it.github.io/malware-families-catalog/api/comine.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.