One interesting point here, that Matt Levine has pointed out, is that previously, upon penetrating a company's network, hackers would do malicious user-harming things like stealing credit card or personal information.
Now, (some) criminals are just running mining software.
As a company, your bottom line might care more about the latter than the former, but as a consumer, this is great news; if hackers lose interest in our data and start stealing and re-selling compute cycles, then the chances of catastrophic identity theft could go down dramatically. Sure, prices for web services might go up a little, but they'll do so across the board.
Now, (some) criminals are just running mining software.
As a company, your bottom line might care more about the latter than the former, but as a consumer, this is great news; if hackers lose interest in our data and start stealing and re-selling compute cycles, then the chances of catastrophic identity theft could go down dramatically. Sure, prices for web services might go up a little, but they'll do so across the board.