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E-Sports League Stuffed Bitcoin Mining Code Inside Client Software
hypnosec writes "The E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) gaming league has admitted to embedding Bitcoin mining code inside the league's client software. It began as an April Fools' Day joke idea, but the code ended up mining as many as 29 Bitcoins, worth over $3,700, for ESEA in a span of two weeks. According to Eric Thunberg, one of the league's administrators, the mining code was included as early as April. Tests were run for a few days, after which they 'decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought.' The code was discovered by users after they noticed that their GPUs were working away with unusually high loads over the past two weeks. After users started posting on the ESEA forums about discovery of the Bitcoin mining code, Thunberg acknowledged the existence of a problem – a mistake caused a server restart to enable it for all idle users."
ESEA posted an apology and offered a free month of their Premium service to all players affected by the mining. They've also provided data dumps of the Bitcoin addresses involved and donated double the USD monetary value of the mined coins to the American Cancer Society.
I advocate the involved parties all be arrested and charged with relevant computer hacking charges. The software development community needs a clear message sent that such activities are federal crimes and will not be allowed. I don't understand why we are still tolerating a Wild Wild West attitude to computer crimes by corporations when the laws are on the books and quite clear.
Also, trying to pass it off as merely an April fools joke is insulting as well. The closest part to a joke was the Office Space grade conversation about skimming from their own customer base.
Sure they are (making money). It's estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto (the anonymous inventor of BitCoin) got somewhere between one to one and a half million bitcoins in the early days, when they were very easy to generate (see the "total bitcoins" graph on wikipedia). Assuming he hasn't sold them off at some point in the past, they're currently worth somewhere between $120 million USD and $180 million USD. That's a pretty tidy profit for one person.
Nah, a better analogy is, you hired me to change your tires, and I decided to put stuff in your car and copy your car lock to be able to access it and get my stuff whenever I wanted. Then when you found out I had copied the car keys I apologized and donated the results of my endeavor to a charity.
Analogies are always wrong in the end, but wrong as it may be mine is still a lot better than yours.