Malware that mines Bitcoin exists since years. It surprises me that given the high difficulties we have, it still seems to be worthwhile on normal CPU's. But maybe it is able to mine with everything it finds - maybe even ASIC's. The new malware seems to be some kind of a Swiss army knife of all functions that have been used to steal cryptocurrencies. The only thing that's apparently missing is locking down the PC to extort payments...
Cryptocurrencies are a highly attractive target for malware developers, because they represent direct proceeds and can be moved easily around the world. So we will see a lot of new malware in the coming years targeting Bitcoin users. Hopefully, users are sufficiently aware of it and have good security practices in place.
ya.ya.yo!
I was thinking the same thing, but if you can "hijack" a BotNet of say 1 000 000 devices and somehow link them together and mine a Alt coin,
you might actually make some money. There are 1.3 billion devices running Android.... and 297 million running iOS/OS X and also 283 million
running Windows in 2015. So it is not highly unlikely that you would be able to get a fair share of that with a good Malware.
... You can
even just use a small percentage of their hashing power, if you want to hide your activity.