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Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
40hz:
FYI: this.
From the What Took Them So Long Dept...
India comes trough! The previously suggested zombie bitcoin miner is real. From the folks at Geek.com:
A new piece of malware is floating around, but that seems like par for the course these days. What makes this malicious bit of code notable is the goal its creators have in mind. The malware is being spread via Skype messages and is designed to turn your PC into a remote Bitcoin mining rig without your knowledge or consent.
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Details at Kapersky here.
8)
f0dder:
What Took Them So Long Dept...
India comes trough! The previously suggested zombie bitcoin miner is real. From the folks at Geek.com:
A new piece of malware is floating around, but that seems like par for the course these days. What makes this malicious bit of code notable is the goal its creators have in mind
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-40hz (April 06, 2013, 11:59 AM)
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Note that "notable" doesn't mean "not seen before" - botcoining is hardly new.
40hz:
^I think the "notable" (as in worth noticing) reference is that the malware's primary goal is to steal CPU cycles for the author's gain, rather than to steal user data from the host machine as is usually the case.
Bitcoin "mining' is something bitcoin itself encourages - so in that respect it's officially sanctioned. It's only when somebody presses somebody else into service to go mining without their knowledge that it steps over the line - hence the term "zombie" miner. (Zombies as in old-school voodoo plantation slave worker type zombies as opposed to our more modern flesh-eating apocalypse variety.)
Now if they could just get cloud service users to unwittingly be running this on something like Amazon's S3... :tellme:
app103:
Note that "notable" doesn't mean "not seen before" - botcoining is hardly new.
-f0dder (April 06, 2013, 12:01 PM)
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There is an interview with a malware writer, from at least a year ago (somewhere on reddit), where he confessed that he made most of his income from botcoining. It was that interview that made me realize that doing it with my own hardware and electricity would probably be futile, not really any different than paying cash for them, and sent me on a search to find out if there was a more ethical way to get others to mine for me.
BTW, if anybody gets the bright idea I had and considers using Bitcoin Plus, forget it. You won't make anything. If you put their script on your site it will be flagged by google as a harmful site. If you link to your miner page it won't, but any BTC that gets mined for you, you'll never get. You can't cash out and the site owner doesn't answer emails. Seems like a big scam to get lots more people to mine BTC for the site owner, by making them think he will actually let them have what's theirs.
f0dder:
^I think the "notable" (as in worth noticing) reference is that the malware's primary goal is to steal CPU cycles for the author's gain, rather than to steal user data from the host machine as is usually the case.-40hz (April 06, 2013, 01:43 PM)
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Yup - but as app also noted, it's not new by any stretch :)
(Nor is the use of botnets for CPU-intensive work itself - they've been used in the past for stuff like factoring RSA keys).
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