New Skype Malware Uses Victims' Machines To Mine Bitcoins

An anonymous reader writes "A new piece of malware propagating across Skype has been discovered that tries to convince the recipient to click on a link. What makes this particular threat different is that it drops a Bitcoin miner application to make the malware author money. While malware has both spread on Skype and mined Bitcoins before, putting the two together could be an effective new strategy."

Comments

Re:Mining for bitcoin, undermines bitcoin

[pla]

This idea that you can 'mine' for bitcoins is what makes me not take it seriously. It seems so arbitrary and ridiculous.

I know, right? Like those lumps of yellow metal or shiny hunks of clear carbon we mine from the Earth. Entirely arbitrary and ridiculous to assign any value to them. ;)

If it makes more sense to you, it may help to stop thinking of it as "mining", and instead consider it as pay for doing the work necessary to add transactions to the blockchain.

Re:Nerdcoin Apologists

[Joce640k]

Keep in mind that as a zombie computer becomes more "obvious"- computer is slower, fan runs at 100% all the time, etc, the more likely that the malware will be noticed and removed.

Typical geek thinking.

So what if it gets removed? If it ran for a week on 100,000 machines with somebody else paying for the electricity then it was totally worth it.

Re:What happens to those mined bitcoins?

[IamTheRealMike]

As cool as bitcoin is, it has serious problems which will keep it from being used in day to day life.

Bitcoin does indeed have problems that make it hard to use in daily life, but "deflation" is not one of them. BitPay has reported that when the value of a Bitcoin rises their transaction rate goes up not down, as macro-economists would predict. Perhaps because holders of coins feel rich and start to splash out. This should not surprise us. The consumer electronics industry has been in a permanent state of economy-destroying inflation since pretty much forever yet even better and cheaper smartphones/mp3 players/etc continue to fly off the shelves. And in case you'd like observations more rigorous, there is no empirical evidence of a link between deflation and depression.

Anyway, obviously the goal is that nobody loses Bitcoins through carelessness - there are many strategies to help people back up their keys, and over time they will become widely implemented and used.