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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."
So when the user detects and presumably removes the malware, what happens to those mined bitcoins? Do they disappear? Are they still in the malefactor's account? Lastly, is there any chance of tracing and impounding the bitcoin account so that the bad guy doesn't profit?
To the people that are saying it's not worth it for malware or botnets to mine coins with CPUs... a single CPU does about 4 MH/s. If 250,000 computers all over the world are affected, that's 1 TH/s, which is about 67 BTC/day at the current difficulty. About $1,000/day, or $30,000/month. Scale appropriately for how many computers are affected.
Yes, it's a waste of time and electricity for an individual to mine Bitcoins with their CPU, but if you have access to 100,000+ machines doing it, and you're not paying for the electricity, it's obviously worth it.