Is a Bitcoin mining virus, more powerful than mining farms?

[Amph]

For example a Bitcoin mining farm might have a few petahashes of mining power. Will a Bitcoin mining virus network have the same amount of power?

Quite a while ago, when scrypt was popular, people would bind a program to game files that would steal GPU compute power and mine while people played games.   It was spread via torrent sites.    It was very profitable back then but would likely be a waste of time now.

they could come up with the same but for asic(i don't know if this is possible, at best you could infect their machine at which asic are connected), but i doubt it could ever steal a large portion of the hash, you need to infect  all those big farms out there

[Evan]

No.

There was a time when mining viruses were abound in the days of CPU and GPU mining. But ASICs are by magnitude more powerful than CPU or GPU, it would take an army of 10s of thousands of PCs to even begin to touch what a single ASIC machine can do. People complained about ASICs but one thing they did do was totally eliminate these viruses because they were no longer very effective. Those kinds of viruses went off to hunt other coins that are still CPU or GPU driven.

Who Cares? its FREE Money to the hacker

[achow101]

Since the malware writer would not have any expenses, any amount of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency mined on that botnet would be profit. The electricity cost is zero for the attacker, and with some good social and software engineering, the virus could be spread very far. Also, the botnet of thousands of computers can still be rented out for blackhat purposes. It doesn't necessarily need to be dedicated to one thing, it could be multipurpose. This is kind of like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_coder_and_botnet_operator_ama/. He made malware which mined bitcoin, was also a banking trojan, and could ddos.

[Unbelive]

Since the malware writer would not have any expenses, any amount of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency mined on that botnet would be profit. The electricity cost is zero for the attacker, and with some good social and software engineering, the virus could be spread very far. Also, the botnet of thousands of computers can still be rented out for blackhat purposes. It doesn't necessarily need to be dedicated to one thing, it could be multipurpose. This is kind of like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_coder_and_botnet_operator_ama/. He made malware which mined bitcoin, was also a banking trojan, and could ddos.

Yes, but once he got them,  but he will use them where he will get most profit out of them. Will mine those CPU mined coins or doing something else.

Not that he will mine bitcoins, just because he can do it.

[Evan]

Since the malware writer would not have any expenses, any amount of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency mined on that botnet would be profit. The electricity cost is zero for the attacker, and with some good social and software engineering, the virus could be spread very far. Also, the botnet of thousands of computers can still be rented out for blackhat purposes. It doesn't necessarily need to be dedicated to one thing, it could be multipurpose. This is kind of like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_coder_and_botnet_operator_ama/. He made malware which mined bitcoin, was also a banking trojan, and could ddos.

Yes, but once he got them,  but he will use them where he will get most profit out of them. Will mine those CPU mined coins or doing something else.

Not that he will mine bitcoins, just because he can do it.

Yes I would..... When I had FREE Power, I was running every laptop and desktop I could get my hands on even if it was a Kilohash miner.. infact at one point I had some 3Mhash Server blades running for me at a  friends datacenter that were not being used at the time.

[Ninjahitoko]

I recently learned that my computer was infected by a Bitcoin mining virus. My antivirus program says that the virus has been on my computer for over a year. After some calculations I figured that the virus mined around .2 BTC over that period. If the same virus infected 5000 PCs it could have mined 1000 BTC.

[VirosaGITS]

You'd need the virus to attack ASIC now. And to be fair, there aren't many miners that doesn't keep an eye on their throughput. I would definitively notice if something more than a few % would go away...

And its not very easy to hack and infect and propagate such a virus that would work on Linux.

Basically i'd have to say yes it would be more powerful, but no i don't see it happening.

[notlist3d]

You'd need the virus to attack ASIC now. And to be fair, there aren't many miners that doesn't keep an eye on their throughput. I would definitively notice if something more than a few % would go away...

And its not very easy to hack and infect and propagate such a virus that would work on Linux.

Basically i'd have to say yes it would be more powerful, but no i don't see it happening.

I would agree most asics are behind a firewall.  They normally are not open to internet.  Also people watch pools pretty close so even if there was a virus asic owners will notice quick.

I do think a botnet could mine the heck out of CPU coins.  Not sure how profitable but I'm sure this is going on.  But again does not compare to asics

[VirosaGITS]

You'd need the virus to attack ASIC now. And to be fair, there aren't many miners that doesn't keep an eye on their throughput. I would definitively notice if something more than a few % would go away...

And its not very easy to hack and infect and propagate such a virus that would work on Linux.

Basically i'd have to say yes it would be more powerful, but no i don't see it happening.

I would agree most asics are behind a firewall.  They normally are not open to internet.  Also people watch pools pretty close so even if there was a virus asic owners will notice quick.

I do think a botnet could mine the heck out of CPU coins.  Not sure how profitable but I'm sure this is going on.  But again does not compare to asics

Indeed, botnet hijacking CPU and GPU to mine altcoin is pretty much the way to go. Doing it on BTC is silly compared to the profitability from doing it on alt coins. I guess many people still don't understand the difference in hash power from SHA256 and all other altcoins, even Scrypt who also have ASIC, it still does not compare.

[Ninjahitoko]

You'd need the virus to attack ASIC now. And to be fair, there aren't many miners that doesn't keep an eye on their throughput. I would definitively notice if something more than a few % would go away...

And its not very easy to hack and infect and propagate such a virus that would work on Linux.

Basically i'd have to say yes it would be more powerful, but no i don't see it happening.

Well Bitcoin viruses can definitely attack Linux.

[VirosaGITS]

You'd need the virus to attack ASIC now. And to be fair, there aren't many miners that doesn't keep an eye on their throughput. I would definitively notice if something more than a few % would go away...

And its not very easy to hack and infect and propagate such a virus that would work on Linux.

Basically i'd have to say yes it would be more powerful, but no i don't see it happening.

Well Bitcoin viruses can definitely attack Linux.

Yeah? Well when a virus that propagate through Windows, manage to infect Linux, bypass the router, inject into an arm processor linux, then i guess we can start getting worried, but there's no skynet virus.

[ranochigo]

Bitcoin mining viruses is actually very hard to be profitable. Since it uses a lot of compute resources, users would feel that their computer begins to slow down hence do a reinstall or scan for viruses. There are mining viruses which only starts when a mouse movement is not detected within certain period of the time. Although this can be more effective, the sound of the fan whirring up can give it away and even if the user doesn't notice, the earnings would drop tremendously.

[VirosaGITS]

Bitcoin mining viruses is actually very hard to be profitable. Since it uses a lot of compute resources, users would feel that their computer begins to slow down hence do a reinstall or scan for viruses. There are mining viruses which only starts when a mouse movement is not detected within certain period of the time. Although this can be more effective, the sound of the fan whirring up can give it away and even if the user doesn't notice, the earnings would drop tremendously.

Thats kind of more or less the case, you can just have the program run in the background and low priority. I can't even tell that i'm mining with my GPU and CPU performance wise. I can play any game, and still mine at full speed, the program just scale back and let other processes go first.