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uTorrent Quietly Installs Cryptocurrency Miner

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-cpu-is-our-cpu dept.

New submitter Eloking sends news that uTorrent, a popular BitTorrent client, is silently installing cryptocurrency mining software for many users. [uTorrent] brings in revenue through in-app advertising and also presents users with “offers” to try out third-party software when installed or updated. These offers are usually not placed on users’ machines without consent, but this week many users began complaining about a “rogue” offer being silently installed. The complaints mention the Epic Scale tool, a piece of software that generates revenue through cryptocurrency mining. To do so, it uses the host computer’s CPU cycles. ... The sudden increase in complaints over the past two days suggests that something went wrong with the install and update process. Several users specifically say that they were vigilant, but instead of a popup asking for permission the Epic Scale offer was added silently.

8 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Worth it? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Aren't bitcoins, between the drop in value and the ASIC enthusiasts, at the point where clandestine CPU mining is close to pointless? I realize that free as in stolen has its virtues; but it likely wasn't free to get their shitware, rather than somebody else's, bundled with utorrent, so I'm surprised that it was worth it.

    1. Re:Worth it? by SirDrinksAlot · · Score: 1, Insightful

      At scale, a world wide army of CPU's will easily crush an ASICs. Mining is about number of hashes per second, one system is slow, an army of misappropriated systems will be very fast.

    2. Re:Worth it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The conclusion of your reasoning isn't to be "surprised", but to deduce that they're probably mining a cryptocurrency other than bitcoin.

    3. Re:Worth it? by Jawnn · · Score: 1, Insightful

      A million CPUs can crush a single ASIC, yes, but people are running warehouses full of ASICs.

      And if they're paying for the space, and the electricity, my army of stolen mining machines is still more profitable. "Anything stolen is pure profit."

  2. Another piece of software to uninstall by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Time to abandon utorrent. In fact, time to abandon all software who's owners bundle in adware/malware/anything-other-than-the-program-the-user-is-trying-to-install.

    The only way this practice will stop is if users refuse to download and use software that does this.

  3. Re:Why uTorrent? by greenwow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It used to be great. It did exactly what you needed it to do and no more. Now it is a bloated mess like Azureus/Vuse. Now when I load UTorrent, my Windows machine slows down so much it is unusable. It loads gigabytes of ads per day. I have ISDN at home right now, and if you let it run 24/7, you can still download a surprising amount of files. That is except with the new version of uTorrent. It makes the ads a higher priority than BitTorrent so your files take days or weeks longer than they should.

  4. Re:How is this post a troll? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow /. dropped the mu. Add a mu before Torrent everywhere in my post. Why doesn't /. understand Unicode in 2015? This is sad.

  5. Re:How is this post a troll? by Sowelu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Do you really want a Slashdot full of Zalgo, emojis, and Japanese character art?