14 DAY TRIAL // Security researchers from F-Secure have come across a Bitcoin mining type of bot that is designed to be controlled by its creators from Twitter.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer virtual currency that can be exchanged directly by users without the need for intermediary banks or payment systems.
Bitcoin received a fair share of both good and bad publicity this year leading to some serious fluctuations of its value. It is currently traded at a rate of around $12 or €9 per unit.
However, the increased popularity of the virtual currency, as well as its benefits over traditional payment methods, have also attracted the attention of hackers.
Malware designed to steal the Bitcoin wallets has already been spotted in the wild targeting wealthy traders. One user got robbed of 25,000 Bitcoins that were worth $500,000 at the time.
Bitcoins are currently "mined" with the help powerful hardware according to a predefined algorithm. A better description for Bitcoin mining is actually decryption.
In order to be more efficient and have more chances of success, Bitcoin miners organize themselves in so-called mining pools and share the profits according to their individual contributions.
Cyber criminals have figured out that botnets would make for a good way to mine Bitcoins since the hardware resources of all infected computers can be leveraged at the same time.
At the end of June security researchers from Kaspersky Lab reported finding a trojan designed to mine malware as part of a mining pool.
F-Secure has now located a program that actually allows users to customize such malware. One interesting aspect this generator has is that it asks for a Twitter username.
This is required because that's the account from which the attacker will issue commands to the resulting botnet. "The commands follow a simple syntax. We detect bots generated with this generator as Trojan.Generic.KD," says F-Secure's chief research officer Mikko Hypponen.