Gold rush
Aleks - Kaspersky Lab Expert
Posted June 28, 13:20  GMT

The recent online hysteria over the BitCoin virtual money system has attracted the attention not only of those who dream of making money out of thin air but also of cybercriminals who, as usual, want to steal anything they can get their hands on.

A few days ago our colleagues at F-Secure wrote that they had detected a primitive Trojan that steals e-wallets from the computers of BitCoin users.

However, some cybercriminals seem to think that it’s more profitable to steal computer resources rather than e-wallets.

Today our analysts detected a new threat spreading in the Russian sector of the Internet – Trojan.NSIS.Miner.a. This Trojan has two components – the legitimate bcm.exe file BitCoin Miner (not-a-virus:RiskTool.Win32.BitCoinMiner.a), and a malicious module that installs bcm without the user’s knowledge and adds it to the autorun registry. The infected computer then starts to generate bit-coins for the Trojan’s author.

[continues on to show screenshots of the deepbit mining account and others]

http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208188132/Gold_rush

Based on their API? The ones on their site aren't very good and of course the site is slow as molasses right now.

Anyone?

Has anyone already done this or attempted it? With the dramatic rise in hashing power that has been added to the network I am curious what that might amount to in terms of raw power consumption.

I understand you'd have to make a lot of educated guesses or estimates, but:

Bitcoin charts gives a current number of 3.390 Thash/s

Just to get us started maybe we could assume a general network efficiency of 50%-75% of a 5850? Or if anyone had an opinion about how better to guess at that.

Then we'd need a good all in number of watts for something stable like 1 Ghash. Maybe the combination of a few decent size efficient mining setups could arrive at a number like that that included the whole room power, meaning fans, power supply loss, cpus, gpus, all in.

Anyone else interested in what the total usage might be? I'm just curious if it's the size of a small datacenter, a large datacenter, a small part of a power plant, etc.

EDIT:

Maybe I can make this simpler. Would 2 or 3 efficient miners mining in the say 3-50 Ghash range be willing to post their hash rate and total all in power consumption to maintain it? Along with a short description of what is running and if AC is involved?