Maybe it's not malicious in the strictest sense of the term but it's also not the same as your Visual Studio example. In your case Visual Studio is a productivi

Maybe it's not malicious in the strictest sense of the term but it's also not the same as your Visual Studio example. In your case Visual Studio is a productivity tool that brings you value and thus you chose to install it. In the case of this docker image it's not adding you value and was installed without your concent. The JS example another commenter made is more apt however the argument there is that you still requested the site and it's content (even if you didn't really want it). Whereas many of the installs of this "dockerised" miner were remotely via exposed Docker APIs. That I think is the real crux of the potential "malice" (for want a better description) here.