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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."
Dunno, but I've been waiting for this to happen. It's an obvious step for botnet owners.
It would be an obvious step a couple years ago. Bitcoin mining with CPUs is so pointless that they removed the function from the software. Most computers likely to be infected likely won't have a powerful GPU, and GPU mining will become pointless pretty soon regardless.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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?
Bitcoin mining with CPUs is pointless .
Only if you're paying for the electricity yourself.
If somebody else is paying ... hey, why not?
There are better and more lucrative things to do with botnets. If you have a botnet and can't think of anything better to do with it, you can lease it out or sell it. The tiny amount of money bitcoin on commodity hardware would bring in pales in comparison to selling bank accounts, sending spam, renting out attacks, etc. 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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
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.
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.
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Except dealing with any third-parties increases your risk. Which one of them has loose lips, poor security, is a snitch or an undercover officer? Even criminals don't want to hang out with other criminals more than they have to.
I don't think you're around the typical computer user much, or their computers. You describe at least 60% of the non-technical people's computers that I know. They shrug it off. Computers suck and they'll never understand why. Eventually it will straight up die and they'll have another frustrating and expensive experience with Geek Squad. Rinse, repeat.
No, because the opportunity cost is what matters. If I had 100,000 machines for a week, then instead of slowly mining bitcoins I could instead rent the botnet to spammers, DDoSers, etc and make more money.
You should read up on the Bitcoin protocol/architecture. "Mining" isn't arbitrary, it's how the system verifies transactions and prevents double spending - you need mining for the whole system to work.
The fact that new coins can be gain from mining is not arbitrary either: first, it encourages people to mine, and therefore strengthens the network. Second, a big part of the Bitcoin appeal is that nobody can just inflate away the value of the coins one owns.
You may disagree with it, but it's definitively not arbitrary.
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Butterflylabs offer ASIC miners
They offer them, but they don't ever seem to ship them, and if they did ship all of the orders, the difficulty rate would go 4 to 16 times harder because of the sudden massive increase in mining.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
There are better and more lucrative things to do with botnets.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
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The average /. poster knows more about anything than anyone. That's why everytime there's a scientific article there's people popping out of the woodwork going: "Aha! Bet they didn't think of that, did they?".
Preferably without actually reading the article that adresses that very point ;-)
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