Trojan targetting bitcoin!

[innocent93]

Trojan targets everything, Bank system, nuclear power station, companies, etc ,and it try to make money or for some politics reasons.

Bitcoin is growing, becoming a traget is also quite common.

[Amph]

as long as your btc are in a cold storage, malware/trojan cannot do anything

otherwise dedicate a network and a desktop exclusively to your bitcoin client, and don't surf or DL nothing on that machine, 100% safe, unless a real thief enter your house, but that's another story....

There is no need to dedicate a whole computer for that, you can much more easily create a virtual machine with all your wallets and rest of stuff u need to protect and store it on a usb drive.
Would make much more sence than having a separate computer just to hold your wallet on it.

cheers

virtual machine share the same network, it won't be 100% safe, i read that there are exploit to by pass virtual machine protection, strong malware/virus can do it

the point is to have a completely separate network

[Bizmark13]

Password protect your wallet. Or save your coins on some trusted exchanger site.
Also, do not disable your antivirus, just update it and be safer.
I said this about antivirus as many users doing it "because it slows down their CPU" or whatever reason is.
Just don't. Stay protected. I know that sometime virus or trojan is undetected by antivirus, but it's more chances to not get infected by keeping antivirus up and running updates every day. Also, Malwarebytes is a good protection, can work with antivirus without conflict.

Im considering moving to Linux for this reason and forget about updating antiviruses and whatnot.

Technically speaking, any computer that is attached to a network is not immune to viruses and Linux malware does exist although it's very, very rare and much less likely to cause any significant damage.

as long as your btc are in a cold storage, malware/trojan cannot do anything

otherwise dedicate a network and a desktop exclusively to your bitcoin client, and don't surf or DL nothing on that machine, 100% safe, unless a real thief enter your house, but that's another story....

That shouldn't be a problem if your computer is encrypted with a 30+ character password via Truecrypt. Even if only your wallet is encrypted, it should still be OK.

[nikona]

Not only trojan but silent miners! That makes 99x PROFIT! Satoshi wont be happy with that 
If satoshi's computer got infected...its over...hacker will probably take over Bitcoin

I'm pretty sure he is safetly storing his btc.. He is not an idiot, come on guys.

Lol..true..He is god when it comes to BTC.. n he wont be leaving it around just like that to be hacked.

[erikalui]

I believe that each bitcoin core installation should include a prompt to backup the wallet on external media (CD, thumbdrive/USBstick, memory card, etc) with the option to encrypt with passphrase. This will assist users who are not tech savvy to at least have a protected hard copy elsewhere.

That would be a good idea and it would be better if it automatically takes a back up whenever a transaction is made so that even if the user misses out to take a backup on one day, it will do the needful without being prompted and get updated regularly.

[kalextospincir]

You have to be careful what you run on your computer these days. Your computer is like a bank account but more susceptible to thefts.

[Slaxt]

You have to be careful what you run on your computer these days. Your computer is like a bank account but more susceptible to thefts.

Your computer is only as safe as you make it if you want to go around clicking random links downloading random crap then even if you have antivirus you should be prepared to be infected there are many top hackers that can infect your computer without even the best av finding it.

Just be careful and do not download crap on the computer you use for anything to do with finance and all will be ok i have never had a problem thankfully, but i rarely use windows so that is a benefit. 

[shogdite]

You have to be careful what you run on your computer these days. Your computer is like a bank account but more susceptible to thefts.

It'll get even worse once the btc price rises again, i've always had a dedicated secure laptop for my bitcoin stuff / hot wallets and then use my main desktop pc for web browsing, games, downloading software etc

[Nerazzura]

Trojan targets everything, Bank system, nuclear power station, companies, etc ,and it try to make money or for some politics reasons.

Bitcoin is growing, becoming a traget is also quite common.

Who will benefit here .. By the way any trojans take bitcoin. And what should we do to save the bitcoin ?? All I know is using offline wallet to save btc

[ranochigo]

Trojan targets everything, Bank system, nuclear power station, companies, etc ,and it try to make money or for some politics reasons.

Bitcoin is growing, becoming a traget is also quite common.

Who will benefit here .. By the way any trojans take bitcoin. And what should we do to save the bitcoin ?? All I know is using offline wallet to save btc

There's a lot of trojan stealing wallets. Obviously the trojan owner would benefit. If you take safety precautions such as not installing random softwares, it should be fine. It would be rather inconvenient to save BTC on an offline computer so most would just put it on their online computer.

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

Trojan targets everything, Bank system, nuclear power station, companies, etc ,and it try to make money or for some politics reasons.

Bitcoin is growing, becoming a traget is also quite common.

Who will benefit here .. By the way any trojans take bitcoin. And what should we do to save the bitcoin ?? All I know is using offline wallet to save btc

There's a lot of trojan stealing wallets. Obviously the trojan owner would benefit. If you take safety precautions such as not installing random softwares, it should be fine. It would be rather inconvenient to save BTC on an offline computer so most would just put it on their online computer.

Just keep things common sense and dont download wallets from recently announced coins specially those that do not release the source code right away.

[Jybrael]

A friend of mine got affected with a trojan and all his media files in his computer got locked. Now he doesn't know how to recover them because the hackers are asking for a lot of btc to release the password.

[R2D221]

A friend of mine got affected with a trojan and all his media files in his computer got locked. Now he doesn't know how to recover them because the hackers are asking for a lot of btc to release the password.

Try booting with Ubuntu. Unless the trojan encrypted their files, they should be able to make a backup with no problem.

[Cryddit]

Password protect your wallet. Or save your coins on some trusted exchanger site.

The saving coins method is flawed. Everyone said inputs.io was legit and looked what happen .

One acid test of whether an exchanger should be "trusted" is if they have EVER accepted a bribe, or even openly charged a fee, to list an altcoin.  It's not the only test you should be looking at but it's definitely one of them.

If they are already known to be corrupt, don't trust them with your bitcoin keys.

[Bizmark13]

A friend of mine got affected with a trojan and all his media files in his computer got locked. Now he doesn't know how to recover them because the hackers are asking for a lot of btc to release the password.

Try booting with Ubuntu. Unless the trojan encrypted their files, they should be able to make a backup with no problem.

Unfortunately, it sounds like his friend might have been infected with a variant of CryptoLocker:

CryptoLocker was a ransomware trojan which targeted computers running Microsoft Windows, believed to have first been posted to the Internet on 5 September 2013. CryptoLocker propagated via infected email attachments, and via an existing botnet; when activated, the malware encrypts certain types of files stored on local and mounted network drives using RSA public-key cryptography, with the private key stored only on the malware's control servers. The malware then displays a message which offers to decrypt the data if a payment (through either Bitcoin or a pre-paid cash voucher) is made by a stated deadline, and threatened to delete the private key if the deadline passes. If the deadline is not met, the malware offered to decrypt data via an online service provided by the malware's operators, for a significantly higher price in Bitcoin.

Although CryptoLocker itself is readily removed, files remained encrypted in a way which researchers considered infeasible to break. Many said that the ransom should not be paid, but did not offer any way to recover files; others said that paying the ransom was the only way to recover files that had not been backed up. Some victims claimed that paying the ransom did not always lead to the files being decrypted.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoLocker

If the files aren't actually encrypted, then it should be possible to recover them by booting with Ubuntu. However, if they are actually encrypted then I don't think there is a way to decrypt it without paying the ransom. This is one of many reasons why it's so important to backup your data.

EDIT: Wait, I found this. Seems to be a new development that could help your friend:

As part of the operation, the Dutch security firm Fox-IT was able to procure the database of private keys used by CryptoLocker; in August 2014, Fox-IT and fellow firm FireEye introduced an online service which allows infected users to retrieve their private key by uploading a sample file, and then receive a decryption tool.

Link to the service: http://www.decryptcryptolocker.com/

Password protect your wallet. Or save your coins on some trusted exchanger site.

The saving coins method is flawed. Everyone said inputs.io was legit and looked what happen .

One acid test of whether an exchanger should be "trusted" is if they have EVER accepted a bribe, or even openly charged a fee, to list an altcoin.  It's not the only test you should be looking at but it's definitely one of them.

If they are already known to be corrupt, don't trust them with your bitcoin keys.

I don't think I've ever heard of an altcoin exchange charging listing fees before but I do know that many legitimate exchanges have paid voting for adding new altcoins where each vote costs a certain fee. In the end, the coins with the most number of votes get added. They get a lot of revenue from these votes so I don't see why a listing fee would be required.

And inputs.io wasn't an exchange anyway. It was an online wallet service similar to MyBitcoin that allowed for off-blockchain transactions.

And really, no exchanges should be "trusted" for storing anything more than pocket change either. If someone is a day trader who must store their coins on an exchange, then they should understand that part of the risk of day trading is that the exchange could go under. Mt. Gox was a highly trustworthy exchange for many years until it imploded. Bter was a respected exchange too but they were hacked twice. Poloniex was hacked too. Same with Bitstamp. No amount of respect or trustworthiness can protect against the possibility of hacks.

[pooya87]

as long as your btc are in a cold storage, malware/trojan cannot do anything

otherwise dedicate a network and a desktop exclusively to your bitcoin client, and don't surf or DL nothing on that machine, 100% safe, unless a real thief enter your house, but that's another story....

There is no need to dedicate a whole computer for that, you can much more easily create a virtual machine with all your wallets and rest of stuff u need to protect and store it on a usb drive.
Would make much more sence than having a separate computer just to hold your wallet on it.

cheers

virtual machine share the same network, it won't be 100% safe, i read that there are exploit to by pass virtual machine protection, strong malware/virus can do it

the point is to have a completely separate network

not necessarily. you can easily not define any network for the virtual machine so that it works as a computer with only minimum requrements like CPU, CD, and HDD and nothing more.

[BitcoinFr34k]

A new report from security firm Symantec claims the number of Trojan malware programs targeting bitcoin users has fallen in the past year. they suggest that since the number of users of crypto is still low it is not a good target!

it is a good news but i thought cryptocurrency was getting popular so as a result it will attract evil people too but seems not!
source: http://www.coindesk.com/symantec-bitcoin-financial-trojans/

If u use multisig, trojan cant do anything as one private key wont give them the bitcoin...

This is only true as long as you store the private keys separately from each-other. If you were going to do this then you might as well use an offline computer to generate and store your private keys and then keep your funds in cold storage

[kpitti]

Trojans are targeting your computers to mine bitcoins. I found report that they find it in the torrent application. I would lie to see if it can bring some significant amount of Bitcoins.

[Bizmark13]

Trojans are targeting your computers to mine bitcoins. I found report that they find it in the torrent application. I would lie to see if it can bring some significant amount of Bitcoins.

No they don't do that anymore. It used to be that some trojans would infect computers and secretly mine bitcoins without the owner knowing but those days are long gone. There would be no point mining bitcoins because even the best computers are no match for ASICs. This has been true since 2013.

As for the torrent application, what you are probably thinking about is uTorrent. The latest version of uTorrent added a program called Epic Scale that uses your CPU to perform computing tasks in the background while it is not in use - one of these tasks being cryptocurrency mining. The cryptocurrency in this case was not Bitcoin but a related coin called Litecoin. Installing Epic Scale was technically optional as you could choose to opt out during the installation process although the installer was written in a way that made it easy to overlook this option.

Can a bitcoin mining virus make a profit today? Actually, yes, it can. But it would make much more sense to channel the computing power into mining altcoins instead. I wrote a detailed analysis of how much profit 1 million infected computers can make here which I've reposted below:

Assuming it could be written and not detected. It would pull either part of the cpu or part of the discrete gpu.

neither part does a lot of hashing.  Say you bleed 10 percent of the cpu or gpu.  maybe 50mh a pc so 20 pc's for 1 gh.

2000 pc's for 1th

2,000,000 pc's for 1ph.

not much more can be bleed off without detection.

So is it possible to make a virus that infects 2mill pc's sure.  and if you are never caught you hash at 1ph. my guess is it would be found out quickly. since all the pc's would be dedicating a decent amount of cpu/gpu/watts to the mining.

If 20 PCs equal 1 GH/s then wouldn't you need 20,000 PCs for 1 TH/s and 20,000,000 PCs for 1 PH/s?

Anyway, both Bitcoin mining viruses and non-SHA-256 altcoin mining viruses would be profitable (it is free electricity, after all). A 1 million PC botnet where each PC is capable of 50 MH/s would have a total hashpower of about 50 million MH/s or 50 TH/s. At the current difficulty, the botnet operator would get a reasonable-ish passive profit of $150* per day according to Coinwarz.

However, the botnet operator could earn much more than this if he chose to mine CPU and GPU mineable altcoins instead. If he mined Darkcoin and we assume that each PC has 3 MH/s of X11 hashing power, he would get $75,000** per day!

Viruses that mine scrypt-based currencies would fall somewhere in the middle as they have ASICs built for them but the performance difference between ASIC mining and GPU mining is not as extreme as SHA-256.

*If the miner only mined at 10% max performance to prevent the PC owners from finding out, it would only bring in $15 a day.

**Again, if the miner only mined at 10% max performance, it would bring in $7,500 a day. I'm not sure if this is practically feasible though since dumping that many coins on an exchange every single day would depress the price and surely the exchange owners will find out?

[Kprawn]

Trojans are targeting your computers to mine bitcoins. I found report that they find it in the torrent application. I would lie to see if it can bring some significant amount of Bitcoins.

No they don't do that anymore. It used to be that some trojans would infect computers and secretly mine bitcoins without the owner knowing but those days are long gone. There would be no point mining bitcoins because even the best computers are no match for ASICs. This has been true since 2013.

As for the torrent application, what you are probably thinking about is uTorrent. The latest version of uTorrent added a program called Epic Scale that uses your CPU to perform computing tasks in the background while it is not in use - one of these tasks being cryptocurrency mining. The cryptocurrency in this case was not Bitcoin but a related coin called Litecoin. Installing Epic Scale was technically optional as you could choose to opt out during the installation process although the installer was written in a way that made it easy to overlook this option.

Can a bitcoin mining virus make a profit today? Actually, yes, it can. But it would make much more sense to channel the computing power into mining altcoins instead. I wrote a detailed analysis of how much profit 1 million infected computers can make here which I've reposted below:

Assuming it could be written and not detected. It would pull either part of the cpu or part of the discrete gpu.

neither part does a lot of hashing.  Say you bleed 10 percent of the cpu or gpu.  maybe 50mh a pc so 20 pc's for 1 gh.

2000 pc's for 1th

2,000,000 pc's for 1ph.

not much more can be bleed off without detection.

So is it possible to make a virus that infects 2mill pc's sure.  and if you are never caught you hash at 1ph. my guess is it would be found out quickly. since all the pc's would be dedicating a decent amount of cpu/gpu/watts to the mining.

If 20 PCs equal 1 GH/s then wouldn't you need 20,000 PCs for 1 TH/s and 20,000,000 PCs for 1 PH/s?

Anyway, both Bitcoin mining viruses and non-SHA-256 altcoin mining viruses would be profitable (it is free electricity, after all). A 1 million PC botnet where each PC is capable of 50 MH/s would have a total hashpower of about 50 million MH/s or 50 TH/s. At the current difficulty, the botnet operator would get a reasonable-ish passive profit of $150* per day according to Coinwarz.

However, the botnet operator could earn much more than this if he chose to mine CPU and GPU mineable altcoins instead. If he mined Darkcoin and we assume that each PC has 3 MH/s of X11 hashing power, he would get $75,000** per day!

Viruses that mine scrypt-based currencies would fall somewhere in the middle as they have ASICs built for them but the performance difference between ASIC mining and GPU mining is not as extreme as SHA-256.

*If the miner only mined at 10% max performance to prevent the PC owners from finding out, it would only bring in $15 a day.

**Again, if the miner only mined at 10% max performance, it would bring in $7,500 a day. I'm not sure if this is practically feasible though since dumping that many coins on an exchange every single day would depress the price and surely the exchange owners will find out?

Very interresting link.. thanks. 

I think the downward trend, was based on the small gains, received from Bitcoin trojan's and people should be made aware that alt coins are also mined from trojan infected machines.

If someone download a "FREE" / "Pirated" game from torrent sites, they should expect a little bonus trojan too. {Free is seldom FREE from virusses or trojan's}

There are many people who still think, it's OK.... so a little bonus, is OK too.   

Imagine if the company, who owned the game, had a way to determine, who pirated their game and instead of disabling it, they could enable a trojan like this and mine for Alt's from that persons CPU/GPU until they received the amount that the user stole from them. {Sounds like a good idea to me}