Bitcoin mining malware spreading on Skype, researcher says - riversmally1961

Surety researchers from Kaspersky Lab have identified a spam subject matter campaign on Skype that spreads a small-arm of malware with Bitcoin mining capabilities.

Bitcoin (BTC) is a decentralized digital currency that has seen a surge in popularity since the beginning of the year and is presently trading at over US$130 per unit making it an attractive investiture for legitimate currency traders, but also cybercriminals.

BTCs are generated according to a special algorithm happening computers victimization their CPU and GPU resources. This operation is called Bitcoin mining and is usually performed away users WHO operate multi-GPU computer rigs. However, minelaying efforts can also be pooled for better results.

Cybercriminals have patterned out that distributed Bitcoin minelaying is a perfect task for botnets and take up started developing malware that can maltreat the CPUs and GPUs of infected computers to generate Bitcoins.

A new spam safari spotted Thursday on Skype tricks users into visiting a scallywag bit.ly URL by exploitation messages suchlike "this is my pet picture of you" as tantalize, Dmitry Bestuzhev, a malware investigator at Kaspersky Lab, said in a blog post.

Visiting the rogue URL prompts users to download a file cabinet called skype-img-04_04-2013.exe that's a malware installer with a low antivirus detection rate, he aforementioned.

Reported to Bestuzhev, the average click rate for the rapscallion Uniform resource locator is high, at all over 2,000 clicks per hour. "Most of potential victims live in Italy then Russia, Poland, Rib Rica, Spain, Germany, Ukrayina and others," he aforementioned.

The malware dropper connects to a command and control host in Germany and downloads additive pieces of malware. The malware does galore things, just the all but unputdownable one is to run a bitcoin mining application on the machine, the researcher said.

Users impressed aside this malware will experience abnormally high CPU usage on their computers as a result of the contagion. "The campaign is quite active," Bestuzhev said. "If you view your car is working hard, using all available Central processor resources, you may cost infected."