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A new trojan has been discovered that is being spread through innocuous looking Skype messages, giving ‘hackers' control of your machine. Once they do so however, they aren't creating a botnet, or stealing credit card details, but making you part of a distributed bitcoin mining network.
Those hit with the trojan and subsequently enslaved into a digital mining camp, are noticing huge spikes in CPU usage – so it's something to watch out for. However the simplest way to avoid it is by not clicking on direct links within Skype conversations, especially if they appear to suggest your friend is sending you the latest picture of themselves. Perhaps just confirm it's them, or ask them to put it on Facebook instead.
The countries hit most by this new trend are located mainly in Eastern Europe at the moment, but it seems likely that as time goes on the trojan will spread.
Fortunately no Bitcoins have been discovered in impoverished African nations, yet.
Discovered by Kapersky Lab, this new trojan is however detected by several piece of anti-malware software. It's detected name is: Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt.
The reasoning behind this new type of attack is thought to be the growing value of Bitcoins. In the past month alone, it's skyrocketed over $100 in value and continues to grow on a daily basis.
KitGuru Says: Quite a smart plan, but even the most rudimentary of computer knowledge will see people catching on to the 99 per cent CPU usage for a single process.
“KitGuru Says: Quite a smart plan, but even the most rudimentary of computer knowledge will see people catching on to the 99 per cent CPU usage for a single process.”
Yes, but a lot of people using computers don’t have that rudimentary knowledge. They will just wonder why their computer is reacting more slowly, (possibly) making more noise, and (for laptops) the battery doesn’t last as long.
The problems are the few people who spoil things for many other people, not cracking down on those parasites, and not alerting people in general that there are nasty people out there who will take any opportunity to take advantage of them even on something appearing as innocuos as their Facebook.