Found: Bitcoin mining bot that is controlled via Twitter

[NothinG]

I just got an RSS feed message this morning about this.

Bitcoin is an electronic currency which is not tied in value to any other currencies. You can convert other currencies (like US dollars) to Bitcoins, or you can mine new Bitcoins by completing complex mathematical tasks.

This creates an incentive for botnet masters to use other people's computers to mine bitcoins for them. And we've seen a some examples of botnets that try to do this.

But now we've found a bot that uses Twitter as the control channel.

The bots are created with a generator. Generator sets a specific Twitter account to be the one which can be used to control the mining botnet.



The commands follow a simple syntax.



We detect bots generated with this generator as Trojan.Generic.KD.

I am well aware of botnet miners, but just wanted to share this with everyone.

[BitcoinPorn]

Thanks for this heads up, interesting.

[CydeWeys]

Wow, what an ignorant bot writer, didn't even use any sort of encoding on the Twitter messages.  Including mining pool URLs directly into Tweets, unencoded, is just amateur hour.