Malware: Now generating Bitcoins

In the past when your computer has been infected with malware, it’s probably done one of the following things:

That’s by no means an exhaustive list. However recently a researcher at Kaspersky Labs has described the following malware, “Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt” as a Bitcon generator.

The full post is here: http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208194210/Skypemageddon_by_bitcoining

Monetizing malware has been a bit of a bother. Each infected computer can only send a certain a mount of spam and that is only going to generate a small amount of money. Bitcoins, however, are now worth over a hundred dollars a bitcoin. A bitcoin isn’t worth a specific number of processor cycles, but if you throw many processors at it by infecting them with malware, they payoff is probably going to be a lot more lucrative than it would be for turning people’s infected PCs into SPAM generating drones.

At the moment this sort of bitcoin generating malware is described as a bit on the primitive side. As the more professionalized malware writers get in on the act, expect the malware to get a lot more sophisticated.

In the past it’s been kinda difficult to monetize malware. With bitcoin mining malware, perhaps the monetization problem has become a bit less complicated.