New Mac OS Trojan Produces BitCoins 247
angry tapir writes about an interesting use for malware. From the Techworld article: "A newly identified Mac OS X Trojan bundles a component that leverages the processing power of video cards to generate Bitcoins, a popular type of virtual currency. The new Trojan was dubbed DevilRobber by antivirus vendors and is being distributed together with several software applications via BitTorrent sites."
Joke's on them. (Score:2, Funny)
Scamcoins arent worth anything anymore....
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I would imagine that they're being mined because they have value.
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Well, compared to sending spam mails, running a DDoS blackmail or whatever else you want to do after you've looted a computer for identity theft and credit card information, perhaps it is. Like does the hacker care if he spends $1 of your electricity to give him 50 cents worth of BitCoins? No. He's taking the profit, you're eating the cost. That doesn't mean it would make sense for anyone else who'd actually have to pay their own costs...
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I imagine they're being mined because someone wants to have the biggest nerd wang. Like in videogames where people have to have the best gear to prove a point.
Bitcoin had a heyday about a year ago but it's a total joke anymore.
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Exactly. Storing value as bitcoins for any meaningful length of time, or spending money to mine them is stupid. Selling them real fast for real money is smart. This black hat has outsourced the mining costs and is probably selling them as fast as they come in - that's very smart.
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The mining difficulty has been dropping in relation to the number of miners that have been leaving the network. This is exactly how the system was designed, and it's a good thing, because now I'm making more coins than I was before. :-)
Lots of folks have mining hardware that was paid off in the $30 days and now they still run for free at work or wherever. Not everyone is paying for electricity.
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If they're stealing electricity from their workplace to do pointless busywork for bitcoins, that seems like a net loss for society. Unless they work for Holocaust Enterprises LLC. or something.
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...that seems like a net loss for society.
Yes. Too bad it's become unfashionable to care about that.
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Mod parent Insightful.
Even if you think home cluster computing is fun and you're wasting your own electricity, it would be better to contribute to an actually useful BOINC project like folding@home, LHC@home or one of the climate projects.
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...from the Rossi cold fusion project! And then you spend the carbon credits to offset your mining rigs and the circle of bullshit is complete.
"...the processing power of video cards..." (Score:5, Funny)
As an owner of a Mac Mini let me just say, "Thank God, I'm safe!".
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Ugggh. I see this junk everywhere. Will slashdot's overlords please consider terminating this account? (and the thousands just like it ...)
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Spammers have ways to automagically create accounts. Usually the spam accounts only create one message.
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Woosh. Read the ggp again.
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And I was worried no one would appreciate that. :-)
Just works! (Score:5, Funny)
I use MACs because they just work!
--A virus writer.
Re:Just works! (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is malware, and it's a lot more than just a trojan. It's also backdoor, and phisher. It's a nasty little package, especially for anyone that thinks macs are immune.
Didn't see any mention of it having and poison pill functions if someone tries to remove it.
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especially for anyone that thinks macs are immune.
It's not people who think Macs are immune that are in danger. It's people who are downloading warez from bittorrent.
Re:Just works! (Score:4, Interesting)
except on the windows platform. There are still plenty that can infect without the user running it as administrator because of crapware called MS office and Adobe Reader that do not run sandboxed but run so that when they overflow they give the code root level access.
Again, it's the craptastic security model of Windows.
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Except that hardly anyone bothers to exploit those. In fact, for quite a while security vulnerabilities in web browsers, Flash, etc were a lot easier to exploit on Mac OS X than on Windows - and even then no-one bothered to exploit them.
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That hasn't been true since 4.3.4.
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Even on iPhone, it's unusual for anyone to bother exploiting those for malicious purposes despite the fact that working exploits are publicly available.
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LOLWUT? Adobe Reader is a top infection vector, right up there with Flash and the JRE, and MS Office apps are still relatively popular targets.
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Well Reader X is sandboxed these days, but most malware exploits Flash and Java anyway because everyone has them installed, nobody bothers to update them, they're automatically loaded by almost every browser and, in the case of Flash, are astonishingly poorly written from a security perspective.
Of course, given that there are hundreds of thousands of machines on the internet that are still passing around things like Code Red and Blaster, it's not a problem that's going to be solved any time soon.
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The problem is the media calls bloody everything a virus, even program glitches on occasion.
What I have also noticed is that bugs are more often called glitches these days.
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A perfect storm of trolling (Score:5, Funny)
A Mac Trojan and a Bitcoin story in one! Quick someone tie this into global warming!
Re:A perfect storm of trolling (Score:5, Interesting)
A Mac Trojan and a Bitcoin story in one! Quick someone tie this into global warming!
What's there to tie into global warming...? Of course the production
of bitcoins uses processor or GPU, which uses electricity, which
pollutes the atmosphere cause it's the electricity from the coal plants
ONLY and not from the nuke plants... but the nuke plants are just
as bad cause they are all susceptible to tsunamis, even the inland
ones.
So, yeah, I added global warming AND nuke, there!
-AI
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ORLY [wikimedia.org]
Give me a nuke any day.
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Hydro
Floods.
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Bitcoins are often used on darknet pedo sites (not kidding, this is my serious face |:-( )
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Crazy! This is like putting a Morris Mini in the bed of a Ford F350.
did you mean the BMC Mini [wikipedia.org], or perhaps the Morris Minor [wikipedia.org].
As far as putting it in the bed of a modern American pickup truck that is how my dad and I transported my 68 MG Midget back from where I purchased it (near Milwaukee, WI back to the twin cities) as my dad's enclosed car trailer weighs more than the midget. Granted we had to put the tail gate down to do this, but with proper tie downs it wasn't an issue. We got 17mpg round trip.
Follow the Trail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Follow the Trail (Score:5, Informative)
It's not perfect anonymity, but there are ways to stay safer by using multiple BTC addresses and such.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity [bitcoin.it]
Re:Follow the Trail (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was doing this, I would have done it just to be a dick, not to profit. That means I'd make it run on a Mac just to go along with the 'macs don't get viruses' meme, and I'd do bit coin mining for no reason other than to devalue it into oblivion because I'm sick Of seeing silly arguments over fiat currancies versus gold backed ones.
Not everything is about monetary gain. Sometimes people are just dicks.
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Applying more computer power to bitcoin mining won't devalue bitcoin any more than it will anyway. The software adjusts the difficulty of generating blocks so that it generates approximately 7200 BTC every day for the next year, fewer after that. More computing power applies to mining just means that individual people mining get a smaller share of the coins being generated.
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That's GP's point: generating extra bitcoins is impossible.
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Not everything is about monetary gain. Sometimes people are just dicks.
...and sometimes dicks fuck pussies.
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Unnecessary Definition is Unnecessary (Score:2)
that leverages the processing power of video cards to generate Bitcoins, a popular type of virtual currency.
At that rate, summary might as well have said:
"A newly identified Mac OS X (a popular Mac operating system) Trojan (a popular method for exploits) bundles a component that leverages the processing power (a measure of processing) of video cards to generate Bitcoins, a popular type of virtual currency (something used for economic exchange (the process of trading one thing for another (something other than the one thing))). The new Trojan was dubbed DevilRobber by antivirus vendors (companies that write v
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that leverages the processing power of video cards to generate Bitcoins, a popular type of virtual currency.
At that rate, summary might as well have said: ""
Well, hell. One day, the summary is too terse and doesn't explain enough.. The next day, the summary explains a single term (that, truthfully, no one pays attention to), and suddenly, that's too much?
Fickle bastards, we are.
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You must be new here, O' almost a million over my UID user.
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NOOB!
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I kind of liked the idyllic worldview in which the author assumed that not all of slashdot had been beaten over the head with a flurry of bitcoin stories, and therefore he had to explain the term. I mean those are some fine rose colored glasses if ever there were any.
Imagine in real life (Score:2)
You have called a plumber. Plumber came in with some guy. Some guy bringed his golden tin, went to your kitchen, took your hammer from your instrument stand and started to mint fake coins. Ow!
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Crooks follow the money! (Score:2)
1) ANY "fiat" currency is intended first and foremost to "promote commerce" and the first need of any actual business that uses the currency is STABILITY. NO (evil!!) government would ever have allowed the "run up" and "crash" of BitCoins that we have seen over the past few months.
2) Governments chase/catch/punish crooks and swindlers - probab
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Stopped reading your post after I saw the "fiat" was in quotes. Hint: it shows off your I-want-the-gold-standard-back total-nutter credentials.
boring (Score:2)
"together with several software applications" the article only says 1, possibly other apps. Bah! Stupid people not being careful deserve to get a trojan.
Not popular, not currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin is in a lot of trouble at the moment.
It is not popular, since the speculators have mostly disappeared at this point. They got in on the market upswing, moving the price to almost $30 per bitcoin for a brief moment. As soon as the speculators reached their plateau, the sell-off began. Bitcoins are selling for 5-10% of what they were selling at their peak. You can expect to get between $1.50 and $3.00 per bitcoin at this point. The true believers still claim that it's coming back, but a single look at any price graph shows that in the end, anything you put into bitcoin is a lost cause. The price continues to drop as more people get out and sell what they have, plus the people "mining" bitcoins selling at whatever the current lowest price is. ALL of the major exchanges have been "hacked" at some point. I say this in quotes because there has never been any proof that the owners of each exchange didn't just decide to take the money and run, which they could have done at any time with ZERO repercussions. One of the larger exchanges was blatant enough to take everything but offer 49% back of what you lost if you'd just use them again (but accept the service fees), as opposed to the others that just delete the website and sell the coins on other markets.
The reason that this is all possible is: bitcoin isn't a currency! It is the same as trading rocks with numbers painted on them to say how much they are worth; this means there is no regulation. It's not anywhere near any other currency in the world because it doesn't have a government backing up it's value. As much as the different sites claim that it is going to change the world, bitcoin itself is being challenged in court and both results are bad for it. If it is declared a currency, the regulations alone will destroy it. If it is declared not a currency (which it is not), it will be destroyed by all sorts of fraud charges.
Stay away from bitcoin at all costs.
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Some of us are glad to see the price drop. I just want to send money to people without PayPal taking a cut or getting a say in who I can send it to. As such, it makes no difference to me what the price is - I can send 3 coins worth $10 or 10 coins worth $3, and it's all the same.
The price drop has crushed the "get rich quick" crowd, and good riddance. Hopefully they learned their lesson and will stay gone so the rest of us can get back to actually trying to USE Bitcoin for something, and see what it's go
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Some of us are glad to see the price drop. I just want to send money to people without PayPal taking a cut or getting a say in who I can send it to. As such, it makes no difference to me what the price is - I can send 3 coins worth $10 or 10 coins worth $3, and it's all the same.
But what do you do with those coins when you receive them?
If you keep them then you are exposing yourself to the massive price volatility and general decline of bitcoin's value.
If you sell them and keep your money on the exchange you will likely be hit with fees for the trade and you are putting your money at risk of the exchange going tits-up.
If you sell them and withdraw your money you will pay even more fees.
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Right now I keep all my money in dollars, trading in shortly before sending and trading out when I receive. Yes, trading fees suck, but for the small amounts I use I don't really care; it's a fair price to pay to get some experience with cryptocurrency. The 0.5% fees to trade in and out (1% round trip) are still considerably lower than what Visa or Paypal charge.
It's far from certain, but I'm hoping it will eventually stabilize after the get-rich-quick jackoffs finish going broke; then I could keep some "
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Sounds like a bank with service fees. Banks without a large capital backing are always at risk of bankruptcy.
Real banks are backed up by national governments. Bitcoin exchanges are not.
You know that Visa and Mastercard take a 2% cut of everything you buy with a card, right?
I know they take a cut, afaict how big that cut is depends on the merchant. OTOH they also give you a month or more of interest free credit which balances out some (not all obviously) of that cut.
Afaict the only way using bitcoin is likely to end up with less fees than conventional transfers is if you keep the money "in the bitcoin system" either in the form or bitcoins or in the form of cash balances at bitcoin exchanges. Both are
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No, not all the exchanges have been hacked. MtGox (the big one) got hacked, but had adequate second-line defenses in place to contain the problem, and it didn't affect customers.
The attacker was incompetent. They had full database write access; if they'd known what they were doing they could've created a whole bunch of accounts with smaller amounts in and withdrawn Mt Gox's entire online reserve of bitcoins, leaving them with too few to fulfill their obligations, but instead they created one big account and ran up against the withdrawal limit.
Re:Not popular, not currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't scare me like that (Score:2)
You sent this cold shiver running up and down my spine. Then I realized you weren't talking about the American Stock Market. Thank god!
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and... (Score:2)
Easy to spot (Score:2)
The point of a trojan is that it's hiding and doing its stuff undercover. Using a VGA all the time is pretty easy to notice.
To be clear... (Score:2)
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With the rapid falloff of interest in Bitcoin someone must have gotten really bored to invest the time to create this trojan. I think they would have been better off creating a 419 scam claiming they need help to liquidate Bitcoin assets without sinking the market.
Actually, (not sure if you care) what happened was the
difficulty in generating the bitcoins got to the point where
buying equipment didn't pay off anymore. So, someone
not bored but greedy... decided to utilize everyone else's
equipment and electricity costs.
-AI
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Only if you haven't outsourced it like every other job in America.
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If bitcoin is the best we have come up with in that direction, I wouldn't be too ready to storm the Bastille. Bitcoin has been shown to have unstable value and to be economically unsound. But hey, using it is "sticking it to the man" so keep on putting your money into something with absolutely no backing or stability. You might be making m
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The instability is part of the system - it's not a bug.
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As for the "gambling" namecalling, you're retarded. I bet you lose your ass in Vegas. Hint: You earn some profit in a fast moving market, you store that profit in a more stable market, continue "investing" with only the profits; Lather, rinse repeat. It works for the Stock Market (your 401k is our life raft), it works for Gambling, it works for Bitcoin too... DUMBASS.
I see. So your money making scheme works like this:
1. You take some of your money.
2. You gamble it in Vegas
3. You inevitably win
4. You transfer the money to the bank afterwards.
5. Profit.
Yup. That is some faultless logic right there. Absolutely no point of failure to be found in that scheme at all. So tell me.... Have you considered selling your home to invest the money in bitcoins? After all, it's only dumbasses that would fail step 3 right?
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The only thing "backing" dollars is the fact that people accept them - that's it. Nobody forces you to accept them, not even the government.
Afaict in the US you are forced to pay your taxes in US dollars. That means that at some point you must exchange some portion of whatever it is you have of value for dollars. The government also went through a phase of trying to force people to exchange their gold for dollars.
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How much have you actually pulled out in dollars or gold? i.e., converted to a stable currency that's reasonably guaranteed to hold its value steadily instead of fluctuating a lot. Assuming that bitcoin mining is a good investment, bitcoin's volatility makes it a poor store of value over the longer term.
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And every cent you made was a cent someone else lost, quite possibly someone else who was actually foolish enough to provide actual goods and services in exchange for bitcoins. There's no actual benefit provided by Bitcoins, it's just a zero-sum gamble masquerading as useful work. Kind of like a minature version of the behaviour in Wall Street that lead us into a massive recession, in fact.
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If I was using Bitcoin for "very fast, nearly free transfer of currency anywhere in the world" I'd care because every time I used it to transfer money, I'd have to risk losing a large chunk of it to speculators as a result of the vale being so unstable. That's why I don't tend to use it.
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Seems like you're totally incapable of doing day to day trading.
Oh well. Not my problem. I've made my money, 6-700X what I invested.
Perhaps you should stop listening to Austrians and Keynesians for economic advice.
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Not my problem. I've made my money, 6-700X what I invested.
The people who get in near the beginning of a pyramid scheme often make money. But hopefully, it gets confiscated when they're sent to prison.
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Except I've personally made a few million TANGIBLE dollars and paid taxes on it.
What again, son? You're mad because us smart adults actually kicked your asses at your own game of bullshit? Oh, as if we haven't been through this before in other times.
Please.
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There is no reason whatsoever for any of us to believe you are not trolling.
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But that's not to say 7% of investors profit from the scam. The scammer would construct a phony pyramid which appears to have 7 existing m
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How did your company make a few million (dollars, I assume) from bitcoin?
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Re:Hahahahaha (Score:4, Funny)
They make GPUs
Re:New Trojan produces Quantitative Easing (Score:4, Interesting)
Because bitcoins want to be free! And, and, they're like... BEER! And... noone accepts them for anything, so you can save a LOT of 'em without being tempted to spend 'em! An... an... they keep you from having to do Real Work! "Honey, don't bother me, I'm minting bitcoins!"
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Anyone can mine bitcoins, you don't have to be a politically connected bankster to participate.
The creation of new BTC is predictable and publicly documented.
Participation is voluntary. Anyone can read about how it works, see that the the amount of BTC in circulation is going to more than double in the next five years, see that the level of commerce with BTC is low and decide if they want to hold any. (Personally I think holding BTC is a bad idea and will be for a years unless commerce increases considerabl
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Of course, unless you were well connected and got in early, it'll probably cost you more to mine than you'll actually make. Bitcoin was designed to seriously benefit the early adopters. It looks like part of the reason the price dropped so much was them selling their huge holdings and making a vast real-money profit whilst the majority of users got screwed. (Some had millions of dollars worth of bitcoins from relatively casual, low-risk and low-cost mining.)
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easy come easy go
currency is supposed to be a token representing value, if large quantities are attainable without doing or making something of value, it will fail.
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bitcoin works at least to some extent; this is further evidence.
Well it's evidence there are suckers^Wcustomers who are still prepared to buy the things albiet at drastically reduced prices compared to the peak. It doesn't really say much more than that.
I don't think anyone has ever seriously disputed that bitcoin works technically. The real questions are
1: does it work economically? can it ever become stable enough that people seriously use it for commerce rather than just mining it/speculating on it/stealing it/making a few token transactions in it to stick it to the