Digital Currency Bitcoins Being Minted With Malware Targeting GPUs

According to security researchers at Symantec, they've discovered one malware, which generates Bitcoins the virtual currency, through leveraging contaminated computers' GPUs (graphical processing units) that understandably have immense power. TheRegister reported this on August 16, 2011.

The anti-virus vendor stated that fresh Trojan named "Trojan.Badminer" was discovered on the harvesting track of Bitcoin that was similar to earlier Bitcoin harvesting malware "Trojan.Cointbitminer," while it relied on weighty machinery for carrying out its task. Consequently, it was much quicker unlike before to harvest bitcoins, the company explained.

Moreover, Trojan.Badminer utilizes GPUs for minting digital coins and this activity is called "minting." Minting helps resolve hard problems related to cryptographic proof-of-work and the remuneration for the solution is 50 Bitcoins for every accurate block.

Reportedly, Trojan.Badminer is featured with tackling all eventualities. Thus, the malware can identify the PC-type on which it's active following which it enables the suitable "machinery" for harvesting via the hashes for gaining admission into the concealed wealth.

An advantage of a GPU over a CPU is that it generally does much better math calculations as well as within hugely parallel software strings. Therefore it's a superior environment to work any number of unlocking systems for resolving the Bitcoin issues.

In this connection, Poul Jensen security researcher at Symantec says that the above potential makes "General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units" (GPGPUs) highly appealing to mine Bitcoins, carry out hash assaults of the brute force kind on databases comprising passwords, and perform folding i.e., stimulation of protein folding within the Folding@home project that Stanford University started. TheRegister published this.

Jenson blogged that as Trojan.Badminer emerged accompanied with rapid graphic cards' utilization, there might really occur good economic sense for hiring networks of bots that would perform distributed Bitcoin harvesting as also execute the process over a large scale.

Meanwhile, being a digital currency, Bitcoins are merely acceptable to just a few outlets. Anyone wishing to know its real potential for making purchases requires selling the currency against any hard currency. The rate of exchange between the two currencies fluctuates; however, presently the American dollar is exchangeable with Bitcoin at $11.44/Bitcoin.

Related article: Digital Criminals Hone Their phishing Skills

» SPAMfighter News - 8/25/2011