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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."
It would if we were interested in the botnet owner' profit margin. However, we're more interested in what costs the botnet owner impose on society in comparison to his private gains. Someone who would smash a $1000 computer to gain $1000 for himself is deemed less contemptible than the one would do it for $1 for himself.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
It would if we were interested in the botnet owner' profit margin. However, we're more interested in what costs the botnet owner impose on society in comparison to his private gains. Someone who would smash a $1000 computer to gain $1000 for himself is deemed less contemptible than the one would do it for $1 for himself.
I'm not sure about that. There was an article in a local paper about someone who did £1,000 worth of damage breaking into a soft-top sports car to steal a pack of biscuits on the seat. The general consensus was that he was a loser and a moron but he got a lower fine than someone stealing £1,000 worth of goods woula have done.
On the uni network I was plugged into some years ago infected machines were redirected to a quarantine page that said "You are infected. Fix it and tell us about it. After that we'll restore your normal access to the network". I think the quarantining was automated, the unquarantining was not. This could go a long way without breaking machines.