Bitcoin Forum

Who do you Mine for?

As Bitcoin grows in popularity each day, its no surprise that hackers are starting to catch on. Most people will share the same fears, losing their wallet to a hacked computer, forgetting their blockchain password or even, the dreaded crash of Bitcoin, potentially leaving many thousands out of pocket.

But there is something you may not know. Among the darker sides of the internet, geeks and hackers join together to talk, trade and share programs theyve built. Some of these programs are quite harmless, auto traders and gatherers for the mmorpg Runescape or IP scramblers for anonymity while online.

Among these programs, there are Bitcoin and Litecoin miners designed to silently mine on infected computers. These pose as a serious threat to anyone Bitcoin follower or not, often praying on casual computer users with little to no computing experience, the miner will lay dormant until activated by the hacker, when in use it will run, using as much processing power as possible, to mine for the infector.

Infected computers are often known as bots, hackers will build up a collection of vulnerable computers of which they have infected, to run their custom built programs, using corrupt miners to generate income at your expense. Not only do the miners generate cash flow for the hackers but the naturally high energy usage of the miners can also incur hefty electricity bills for the infected computers owner, not to mention the damage excessive processes can cause to dated machines.

It is impossible to say for sure how much influence these infected machines have on the Bitcoin network, many thousands of the miners in pools may well be infected machines, generating a steady income for cyber criminals. Fortunately thanks to the invention of ASIC chips and the steady deployment of them across the world, it seems unlikely these hackers will ever be able to manipulate the network.

But please heed my warning, especially if you are an investor in Bitcoin;

• Run a regular anti-virus scan on your computer and keep the software up to date!
• Never download programs that you do not trust, ever. You never know what youre downloading
• If you hold Bitcoin locally on your computer encrypt the wallet, keep it safe

CDKey-Hut Press section (http://'http://cdkey-hut.com/index.php?page=Press')

Good info. I think  you can never be too cautious.

Thank you for the great info!
You are right... some people have no clue their computers are mining for others and then they wonder why is their computer so slow.

Websites you visit can also have you mine Bitcoins for them while you are browsing their site:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/05/01/217230/e-sports-league-stuffed-bitcoin-mining-code-inside-client-software

I mine for Jesus!

(just kiddin')

Yeah a friend of mine found one a while back which used java to mine on your machine (cpu only) - the key difference is you had to allow it to mine to take any effect

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate (http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate)

The case with the ESEA the users had already allowed their program to access their computer so there was little anyone could do about it, it's just lucky it was found so quickly, it's quite undetectable especially if you're already playing games you might not notice that your cpu/gpu usage has gone way above what is needed

My son just asked me the other night if i had installed a miner on his machine. I had not and told him to get to virus scanning. He got it removed but still isn't sure where he picked it up from.

You have to be very careful - there are a lot of 'miners' which will do nothing but compromise your machine and mine for the infector

I think it's very important to be wary of any new coin and their miner especially if one comes about offering what appears to be a great deal like a low hash rate high return. There are a few which I have been tempted to download with offers like first 1000 blocks give 10,000 coins, in the end I decided it wouldn't be wise to risk it.

The same goes for wallets, if it's not know or trusted, don't trust it

I'm glad your son was able to remove the software - as a precaution I would suggest moving any locally stored coin to a new wallet/paper wallet