New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour to mine Bitcoins

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/05/new-skype-malware-spreading-at-2000-clicks-per-hour-makes-money-by-using-victims-machines-to-mine-bitcoins/

by knappster • 13 years ago

73 47 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

Bud• 13 years ago

Why does Skype even have any clickable links in it at all if Microsoft can't be bothered to keep the obvious malware out?

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

Don't miss the forest for the trees. If it wasn't skype, it'd be some other channel. The point here is that mining malware is a rather new and troubling phenomenon.

eurleif• 13 years ago

There will always be ways to monetize malware. I'd rather they monetize it by mining Bitcoins than by doing something more destructive.

neurotech1• 13 years ago

And of limited real value. A CPU only miner would yield about 10 MHash/s or less on standard hardware, and a malware/junkware loaded PC will do even less.

Evbn• 13 years ago

Re the conclusion: to protect yourself, don't run an OS that will silently install software just because you clicked on a blue link in a program published by the OS vendor.

Steve Ballmer should be jailed as an accessory for allowing this.

D9u• 13 years ago

With a malware name like "Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt" - implying a Windows vector - I can't see why someone would downvote you for that comment.

I've got Skype on my *nix box, so do the downvoters assume that my system is also vulnerable to this malware?

kevingadd• 13 years ago

There's no indication anywhere in the descriptions of this malware - on Kaspersky's blog or elsewhere - that it is exploiting any new or unique Windows-specific vulnerabilities. It could easily just be a downloadable executable that people are stupid enough to run. Social engineering works great. If your goal is simply to get a malicious executable onto as many machines as possible, Win32 is the obvious target to choose.

You've got Skype on your *nix box: Are you certain it's NOT vulnerable to malware? Obviously a Win32 executable isn't going to run on Linux, but if there's a hole in Skype what's stopping the bug responsible for that hole from causing a similar problem on Linux or OS X?

At this point no facts have been published to describe the nature of the malware in depth, so it's stupid to assume that it's dependent on some platform-specific exploit. On the other hand, it relies on clicking a link, so hopefully you're smart enough not to click shortened URLs sent by friends on Skype, no matter what OS you're running!

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

Malware Bitcoin-miners, hmm? I don't like Skype as a vector... what if you could put it in the browser instead? Which leads me to a less malware-y idea: write a JavaScript/Flash/similar component that mines bitcoins in a web browser. Put it on your site instead of ads. Has anyone beat me to it?

igul222• 13 years ago

Mining bitcoin on a CPU these days is like digging for gold with a garden shovel. Once upon a time it may have worked, but today it's basically useless (even if you do it on a million computers at once).

base698• 13 years ago

WebGL FTW!

GHFigs• 13 years ago

Has anyone beat me to it?

Where BitCoin is concerned, the answer is always "yes".

jared314• 13 years ago

That idea came, and went, two years back.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0

pizza• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365

throwawayG9• 13 years ago

Too late xD

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable

lifeformed• 13 years ago

That'd be an interesting advertising alternative that could be good for both parties. In exchange for content, you give the website X CPU cycles (or GPU I guess). It could be built into the browser so that you'd have really efficient mining techniques. Clients (with beefier computers) could choose to give more cycles to their favorite sites.

I'm not sure if you could provide comparable amounts of revenue. I guess time-spent-on-site would be the most important factor. At the current cost and difficulty of Bitcoins, you'd need 1,000 concurrent users on average all day all running at 10mhps to just make $92 per day. 10mhps seems like it's asking a lot, it'd probably drain a lot of batteries.

crgt• 13 years ago

What if you were, say, Facebook, and had lots of visitors, good time-on-site metrics and you were still searching for ways to grow revenue? Might it make sense? Seems like their entire userbase could combine to mine quite a few bitcoins.. But I'm not a miner, so perhaps I'm wrong? A quick search turned up a Fast Company article that claims (http://www.fastcompany.com/3005269/facebooks-daily-mobile-us...) 618 million daily users. Assuming that most of those folks aren't logged on all day and many (more than half!) are logging on via mobile, you'd probably only be able to convert a fraction of those to effective miners, but even still it sounds like a lot of bitcoins per day. Perhaps they might offer users the option in exchange for better privacy controls and/or an ad-free experience?

kansface• 13 years ago

A ton of companies have tried to monetize spare cpu cycles. The problem is that you can't do anything valuable with them. Most problems aren't trivially scalable, you have to assume malicious users so that means you need to essentially double efforts, and third parties aren't comfortable sending data through the system.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Yes, I think so, but it would probably be pointless by now, and many would notice.

dscrd• 13 years ago

Why do you think the browser would be a better vector than Skype?

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

I didn't say it's better. I just like it more.

fizx• 13 years ago

plura?

ippisl• 13 years ago

Plura Processing pays affiliates up to $2.60 per full month of computing time provided(when they have customers).

I don't think it competes well with advertising.

stevekemp• 13 years ago

Once upon a time, when java applets were exciting, fresh, and new, I wrote an applet which calculated digits of PI and used CGI to post them to my server.

Visitors would watch animations, whilst I "stole" their CPU time.

That must have been 96/97 or so.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

A new market for malware opens. This is even better than spam.

waps• 13 years ago

Actually it is better, isn't it. If malware starts working to keep the bitcoin transaction network operational as opposed to spamming or stealing webbanking keys ... then it's actually doing something that's either neutral or useful. Useful if you like bitcoin.

That'd be a great step forward. I doubt it's worth the effort though.

arjie• 13 years ago

Shouldn't it also be more noticeable? Quiet spyware can go undetected, but something that's eating up loads of CPU cycles is less likely to do so. That's a good thing.

RobotCaleb• 13 years ago

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable

I don't see how this is any worse.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

Yah I remember seeing that and thinking it was extremely scummy. No one else was complaining though...

swinglock• 13 years ago

One is malware, the other isn't. When I open their "Generate Bitcoin" page it won't run because I don't have Java, not JS, in my browser. If I did it would ask me for permission to run and if I said yes it wouldn't be persistent.

The Skype malware is classed as a malicious IRC-bot so unless it's very specialized it's safe to assume it includes other features as well, like DDoSing, searching and mass uploading of files ("wallet.dat"?), mass downloading and running of files (so the backdoor could be extended at any time), login form reporting and what have you.

vertis• 13 years ago

Evil...and yet I'm a bit disappointed it doesn't try to use the computers GPU instead of CPU.

(and yes I'm aware this wouldn't work in all cases).

aspratley• 13 years ago

Is it also stealing people's local wallets too?

guelo• 13 years ago

A keylogger would be more lucrative than a bitcoin miner.

IheartApplesDix• 13 years ago

A bitcoin miner is much safer and requires much less time commitment.

mfringel• 13 years ago

[IANAL] A bitcoin miner sidesteps "unauthorized access to information", taking advantage only of the the compute resources. I'm not sure if that makes any real difference in the eyes of the law, though.

kaonashi• 13 years ago

Does all the computing power put towards Bitcoin mining strike anyone else as an extreme waste of electricity?

New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour to mine Bitcoins

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