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GPGPU Bitcoin Mining Trojan
An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers have unearthed a piece of malware that mints a digital currency known as Bitcoins by harnessing the immense power of an infected machine's graphical processing units. According to new research from antivirus provider Symantec, Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting. That's the term for solving difficult cryptographic proof-of-work problems and being rewarded with 50 Bitcoins for each per correct block."
It's actually known as mining, not minting, even though it still makes sense. :D
Would these count as counterfeit bitcoins? ;^)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It was only a matter of time.
It was only a matter of time before this happened. The person who is receiving the bitcoins should probably watch out for this : http://slashdot.org/story/11/07/25/1239210/Bitcoin-Is-Not-Anonymous
A digital currency called Bitcoins, you say? Intriguing, tell me more!
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
This "digital currency" sounds fascinating - I wonder why Slashdot's never covered it before?!
We Don't Care About Bitcoin.
Wasn't one of the big "selling points" of bitcoins that they weren't inflationary?
Ooops.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm sure the crackers will enjoy spending their virtual pennies on any of the varied goods and services available within the Bitcoin economy: herpes, home brewed acid, and yaoi themed web sites.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I am not sure. But everybody with a little bit of real understanding should know that bitcoin is a fucked idea. It wont work, for a number of reasons.
The most important one is that the creation of a bitcoin is *not* backed by anything. It burns computational power for nothing. But just using energy to produce it does not input *value* in the same way in which printing a bill or forging a coin does not produce any value.
It only links the the will to back this money to whoever puts his name on it.
There would be a number of ways to introduce a valid digital currency, but bitcoin is just a senseless ponzi-scheme for wannabe hackers.
because i appreciate it's true value:
it serves as the perfect obsession and time waster for the kind of idiots who would otherwise be commenting idiotically on our monetary policy and currency
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Anyone running a mining pool knew this was out there or should know. One account with hundreds of connections from different machines turning in a relatively small number of shares points straight to botnet activity.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
According to new research from antivirus provider Symantec, Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting. That's the term for solving difficult cryptographic proof-of-work problems and being rewarded with 50 Bitcoins for each per correct block."
I thought that was called "mining." As in "bitcoin mining." As in the title of TFS.
I hope they don't harness the "immense" power of my Intel GMA......
What is Bitcoin? For somebody whos never heard of it before, how do you describe it?
Mike Koss: Bitcoin is a digital currency. The really interesting thing about it is that it's totally decentralized. No government agency, no bank stands behind it. It was a geek by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto who started it in January 2009. He just invented a protocol and said, if you want to join me in this activity, we will all share in this new world of creating our own currency.
So how does it work, exactly? Can you give us a Bitcoin 101 on the mechanics? How do you get a Bitcoin, how is it created, and what's the economy like?
Peter Vessenes: Fundamentally, how you get a Bitcoin would be just like how you buy anything else. You could buy one online because they're digital. You can come by Startpad. Mike will sell you one, or I will sell you one. Or ten or whatever you want. The way most people are obtaining their Bitcoins is just through some economic transfer.
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/rewind-risks-aside-seattle-startup-vets-see-potential-in-bitcoin
Google says there's thousands of crackpots that support your position and dozens of fairly large economies that demonstrate fiat currency works just fine. There are more crackpots and we know that facts, just as much as elections, are determined by popular vote. However, a scientific analysis (sucks/rocks) shows fiat currency rocks by a margin of 108000 to 82700.
Of course, the fact that the world economy has gone in the shitter, can be used to argue that any economic practice inconsistent with your particular ideology (e.g. the more general concept of exchanging goods and services for money) is invalid.
All these bitcoin articles remind me of the Second Life articles they used to run here. If you had read /. back then, you'd think we all had avatars and all made millions selling virtual real estate, setting up a virtual B&M company presence, and converting our Linden dollars to real dollars(sound familiar?). My guess is all those folks are now making bitcoins...
What, did you learn to program from school advertising on a matchbook cover?
Better triple-check your code. You don't want to be off by a few decimal places.
Superman will come looking for you if Milton burns the office down.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Assets (i.e. shares of stock) have real, useful, "stuff" usually behind them.
But currency? Not even gold has that much worth outside of it's value as a medium of trade. It has certain useful properties, but those properties are all out of proportion to its currency value. (i.e. I can light fires with $100 bills, but that isn't what gives $100 bills value.) A currency is used as a medium of convenient trade in place of actual useful items.
We use currency (Gold, BitCoins, Dollars, Euros, Silver, seashells, shiny rocks, whatever) because barter of actual useful goods and services is cumbersome and is no way to run an economy.
BitCoins are a limitless source of Fail through all sorts of technical and economic problems, but "not being backed by anything" isn't one of them.
P.S. You aren't the only person to confuse assets and currency. A great number if BitCoin backers think BtC's are the Greatest Currency Ever because the value of their stash (in relation to Dollars) has jumped so much. (Hint: You don't want a currency to change in value at all, or at the least you want it to be predictable. BitCoins are neither stable nor predictable when compared to any "real" currency.)
If the botnet controllers have any brains, they will immediately sell off any bitcoins they mine to convert them into real money, thus driving down the price on the exchanges. The combined wealth of all people who believe in bitcoin is probably not increasing, as the low-hanging fruit has already been picked and all the enthusiasts have already spent all the money they can afford buying bitcoins. Thus introducing new bitcoins into the system will just dilute their value relative to the combined wealth of the community in dollars (or whatever other actual currency they use).
People shouldn't be wasting money anyway.
And do you think your banks keeps a vault of gold to backup your $US or whatever currency you use? Currency does not need "backing" for it to be a store of value. It needs to be trusted to be a store of value. Bitcoin is backed by mathematics. It is difficult to devalue the currency because it is mathematically difficult to mint coins.
Put them in Prison, see how they earn and spend their own Butcoin.
so what's the magic number of places that will take a bitcoin as payment before it becomes "currency" instead of "asset"?
The magic number is one sovereign state's department of revenue, if this comment, this comment, and this comment are to be believed.
by harnessing the immense power
.. of a Neutron Star?
Dude, chill.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Fiat currency: Basically every major world currency is by fiat now. There are good arguments both ways, but if you feel strongly about this, I hope you keep all your assets in gold instead of USD, which isn't backed by anything.
CPU: The CPU/GPU cycles aren't wasted. They provide the security for BTC by making it computationally infeasible to double-spend (you'd need to out-compute the rest of the network). If you know a better way to do this in a decentralized way, speak up!
Why BitCoin and Slashdot: Because it's the intersection of the networking, cryptography, economics, freedom from central authorities, and futurism. Perhaps you don't care, but collectively, it's stuff we're interested in. I don't suggest BitCoin as an investment (the value is driven more by speculation than need at present - you'll lose your shirt unless you have experience in forex and penny stocks), but it's absolutely an interesting topic for discussion - even if only so we can find the flaws and start thinking about how to start Bitcoin2 without them.
Disclosure:
My present holdings: < 5BTC
My market position: no orders open or planned
My business: The making and selling of physical goods and services (legal, non-BTC-related)
My goal: a stable, international currency with no central authority taking a percentage of every sale I make or controlling my funds
I love how people on slashdot will comment on something they know nothing about. First of all, a correction. It's called mining, not minting. Secondly, a fairly high end GTS450 will get 40 million hashes per second which is nothing. You need a very specific set of radeon 5000 or 6000 series card(s) like my 5830 which gets 320 million per second and costs a mere $130. CPU mining on my i5-2400 gets 12 million per second so that's absolute crap. So the virus is costing more in electricity than it receives in profits but it doesn't pay for electricity which I guess makes it worth it.
By the way, what's the US dollar backed by? What are most of the currencies in the world backed by? They're all backed by the fact that people know other people will accept them for goods and services and the fact that you can exchange them for another currency. That's true for bitcoins as well. They're at around $10.80 US per bitcoin right now and that's set 100% by unrestricted free trade at the exchanges. You can turn BTC into USD in under 24 hours for free with a wire transfer for this entire month and at a $5 fee after this month (since they had technical problems with Bank of America) and if you wanted a printed check mailed, that's free permanently. That alone is creating value because epople know they can always get "real" money for their coins. I've personally bought some nice cabling and computer parts with BTC and sold even more for BTC. No bullshit ebay and paypal fees or locked paypal accounts or massive delays or anything. You just send a payment and it's instant and free. You don't have to prove your address or be over 18 or any of that whole song and dance. So yeah, people are using it, they're continuing to use it, and the overall usage volume since last year has increased by about 100x and at least 10x since May. Oh anf FYI, a lot of mining rigs are running partially or completed on solar and wind so don't forget that.
You better get used to it or at least read up on how it works before you hate on it because it's not going anywhere and you'll probably eventually be using it.
Ugh, stop with the bitcoin garbage! No one cares!
it talks about the *chemical* reactivity of gold when the explanation was referring to the nuclear reactivity of gold. It then talks about the radioactive decay of gold when normal gold (Au196) doesn't decay at all. Not that I'm proposing the explanation is right, just that the rebuttal is wonky.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gold+&a=*MC.gold+196-_*Isotope-
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Bitcoin will be the perfect currency for the libertarian paradise out in the ocean.
nana nana nana nana
nana nana nana nana
BITCOIN!
I fail to see how this has any impact on the BTC network stability -- in fact, they're only helping to make the network more secure. The only known vulnerability in the network is the threat of someone being able to write blocks faster than all the other non-cooperating nodes, which means single-handedly controlling more than 50% of the entire global bitcoin computation. The more miners there are, the harder this is.
The more direct threat here is if the botnet itself approaches 50%+ of the network. But as it is, the global computation rate is high enough that you'd probably need a few million computers in your botnet to even get to the same order of magnitude as the rest of the network.
As for complaints about "illegal bitcoins," there's nothing to see here. Do people lose confidence in USD everytime someone robs a bank because there are "illegal" dollars in the wild? No, money is money, bitcoins are bitcoins. The problem/illegal part was the person robbing the bank or unauthorized access to people's computers to create a botnet. They're still legit Bitcoins. The only threat to the network is as someone else said: the people controlling the infected computers are probably dumping the coins on the market right away to convert it to cash, which will lower the price slowly over time. And other miners (like myself) will make a few less milli-BTC per day for our watts...
It's really a shame that Bitcoin is getting such negative press. It has real, legitimate and web changing possibilities if it drops the negative associations and begins to become legitimate. In particular, it would allow anonymous micro-transactions without a per-transaction fee. This could be HUGE for web developers, designers, bloggers and anyone who works online for a living. It would allow us to bypass the big advertising networks and get money directly from our customers with little-to-no transaction fees and no dangerous exchange of information. Yes, it's true that users won't spend $1.00 to read or donate to your blog. But they might spend 0.00005 BTC. If bitcoin transfers were so easy to do and integrated into your browser (perhaps with a
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
I reported that Symantec were blogging about this back in June
There is no such word, idiot. People who use the made up word "irregardless" are morons.
I think the word you were looking for is "regardless". What does "irregardless" mean? Regardless? Moron.
Much less appealing to attack me. ;)
What about the moral perspective on this; technically what is it about this that's in any way immoral or illegal?
If your machine gets compromised and someone decides to use your spare cycles to mine bitcoins then what does this mean for the end-user? For a start your power bill might go up a bit. Someone really needs to work out how many dollars a compromised machine costs its owner. Just because there's no perceived loss by John Doe doesn't mean there isn't a crime...remembering that ripping a CD isn't technically a theft from the recording industry but, guess what, it's still a crime (with pretty stiff penalties as well). At the same time we have to look at this as something less than compromising a machine with a keylogger since there's no intercept here, it's really just stealing power and cycles.
Here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2159376&cid=36158738
A lot of noise was made by the BitCoin Apologists that the value of any given BitCoin would match the cost of the resources it took to produce, making it the ultimate in fair, distributed currency, and no one could flood the market because it wouldn't be worth overproducing, right?
The catch is, of course, that it's possible to steal those resources pretty easily. I have to wonder why we wouldn't just assume that BitCoins are all mined by botnets, since the only way to make money mining bitcoins is to steal the resources from someone else.
I hear about this fad, it's called the USD. The thing about it is that it's a kind of a Trojan, such that if if you get paid in it, it immediately loses value. Apparently the hacker sits in a place called 'The Federal Reserve', and everybody is even familiar with the name, it's 'Ben'. And this guy spreads the USD around but it's insidious. You see, the virus is the USD itself, it's constantly being printed (not even literally printed, just created out of thin air in bank accounts of the Fed's member banks) and then the banks spread this stuff and sometimes the Fed itself spreads it around by the ton. The problem is obvious - with more and more USD around, the larger amount of them ends up chasing the same amount of goods/services/commodities, so relative to USD the prices seem to go up all the time, especially where the USD is exported to.
But apparently the other part of the trick is quickly to export the stuff out of the country of origin via various mechanisms, which are currently mostly relying on importing the ready manufactured goods and energy carriers, such as oil and gas, and this allows the prices in the country to stay relatively stable while out of the country the USD is hoarded by governments, who print their currency to buy the USD from banks, thus transferring the effects of this inflation upon the shoulders of the producers in the world, which immediately reflects for them in higher prices.
Obviously this hack is nearing its logical conclusion, with the USD saturation around the world nearing the levels, at which the further absorption becomes impossible due to the political situation at the nations that are absorbing it.
The wonderful social hack here is how many people are on board with this manner of status quo, while the same people seem to be in favor of more government spending on the 'poor', because they are 'suffering', all this while not noticing how any amount of value in the USD in the pockets of those very 'poor' burns a serious hole in the pocket of this guy Ben.
This is the biggest hack and Trojan ever, in the history of human civilization and it's so brazen and out in the open, that it is amazing that the perpetrators are still not found guilty of all sorts of machinations and are not thrown to jail or worse!
You can't handle the truth.
Are you telling me that a malware piece can harness the power of my GPU and legit software which is suposed to can't do it right? Maybe all those programers should take note of this and start ofering good GPU support.
"Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting"
Isn't that how the `real' economy works, the gov lends non-existent money to the banks, the banks lend it to the customers and the gov mints coins to cover the transaction.
Setting up the software based on the specific type of video card you're running plus getting the connection setup through the firewall to download new blocks is something even people trying to do, have trouble with, let alone some gay trojan.
Check the release here on the blog: http://tradehillblog.com/