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Sinkhole Sucks Brains From Wasteful Bitcoin Mining Botnet
judgecorp writes "A sinkhole has taken a quarter of the bots out of the ZeroAcess botnet which was making money for its operators through click fraud and Bitcoin mining. This particular Bitcoin mining operation was only profitable through the use of stolen electricity — according to Symantec, which operated the sinkhole, ZeroAccess was using $561,000 of electricity a day on infected PCs, to generate about $2000 worth of Bitcoin."
To be fair, killing people with flu would reduce healthcare costs, and would increase the number of jobs available (or reduce the state pension costs if the person is retired). The undertaking business would also boom during Winter months, and inheritance tax income would be higher because people would be more likely to have higher savings due to dying early. Of course it would increase training costs for companies whose employees have been killed, so it's not all good news. Also, it might upset some family members.