New Bitcoin Trojan.badminer, adds your gpu to a botnet to mine for others.

www.dailytech.com...

The article states Symantic has found in the wild a new kind of trojan. It takes over your gpu cycles to mine bitcoins for other people. I'm not sure how effective this will be since most people have crappy intel integrated graphics. I'm only rocking a HD 3000 myself lol.

Moral of the story. If you use bitcoins then do it on a slow computer.

reply to post by wiandiii


Yeah, this is pretty old news now. I have to admit it's a fairly genius scheme, but I imagine it's very risky business. This type of trojan is very obvious and easy to detect.

It's definitely a unique and modern way to make money via compromised computers, but it only hurts the image of Bitcoin of needs to be prevented as much as possible.

Many mining pools have implemented measures to stop large botnets, but there is nothing stopping the hackers from setting up their own pools or solo mining.

In the end it's really up to the user to ensure their PC isn't infected with malware or viruses. As long as computing power can generate income botnets will exist.

This mining is a very important part of the security of Bitcoin as it is an encryption algorithm that uses shear computing power to established its security. As Bitcoins are continued to be released up until 2017 or so, the expect demand of computing power is going to be huge. Processing farms are expected to be set up to perform this and are paid for by Bitcoins.

The black market has been using Bitcoin due to it anonymity in transactions. The community is taking this problem seriously as it is vital to the long term stability of the currency and is working with currency regulators to achieve this. It should be relativity easy to track down this processing farm that is infecting systems and using up resources without permission. It will take some time, resources and organisation. I am not surprised this has occurred as many different options and weaknesses are exploited all over the place. It does need to be addressed though to establish integrity into the culture of the currency.