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GPGPU Bitcoin Mining Trojan

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-thats-not-so-bad dept.

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."

7 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Fake? by Mikkeles · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Would these count as counterfeit bitcoins? ;^)

    --
    Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
    1. Re:Fake? by ComaVN · · Score: 5, Insightful

      no, why would they?

      Gold mined by slaves is still gold, and I guess the same applies here.

      --
      Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
    2. Re:Fake? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      no, why would they?

      Gold mined by slaves is still gold, and I guess the same applies here.

      Yes, but I thought BitCoins were supposed to be magical holy things designed to solve all the problems of our shamefully evil, evil currency. Exploiting people for profit sounds like a problem. Why am I supposed to use BitCoins if it still has the same problems our currency has today?

  2. no suprise. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It was only a matter of time.

  3. From irrelevant to obsolete in one fell swoop? by Rogerborg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  4. Why? Bitcoin and Slashdot? by drolli · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why? Bitcoin and Slashdot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good god, the "not backed by anything" argument again. Please come up with something that has at least a tiny contact with reality. Bitcoin has been criticized enough that you should be able to find a relevant criticism fairly easily with google.

      Modern currencies typically aren't backed by anything. They only have value because people trust they have value. This works just fine for established currencies and we've already seen it works surprisingly well even for extremely tiny currencies like bitcoin.