First-order effects

• CoffeeMiner removes that dependency: by intercepting traffic on public Wi-Fi, an attacker can inject mining code into any unencrypted page a café or airport visitor loads, turning every connected laptop and phone into a Monero miner without the site owner's involvement.
• Public Wi-Fi operators now face a reputational and liability exposure they did not have when cryptojacking was confined to compromised websites — their network is the attack vector.

Second-order effects

• The same logic scales beyond hand-run hotspots: the later discovery of 415K+ infected routers, mostly MikroTik shows attackers automating exactly this move — compromising the network device once and mining from every client behind it.
• Browser vendors' crackdowns on in-page miners push attackers toward network-layer injection instead, since CoffeeMiner-style interception does not depend on a page's own JavaScript surviving.

Third-order effects

• Wi-Fi itself becomes the durable weak layer: the 2023 flaw in the IEEE 802.11 protocol enabling malicious TCP packet injection, and the AirSnitch attacks that bypass client isolation, show the protocol's assumptions keep yielding machine-in-the-middle openings long after individual tools like CoffeeMiner are patched around.
• If hijacking other people's compute stays this cheap, cryptojacking consolidates as the low-risk monetization path for network attackers — no ransom negotiation, no file destruction, just silent harvesting of electricity someone else pays for.