Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/13/monetizable-malware.html
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I wonder how effective those infrastructure control systems are at mining coins, given that normally you’d be using GPUs. I imagine they’re causing potentially lethal problems with infrastructure while not even generating anything of financial worth.
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"I’m aware of the danger of [malware miners] being on industrial control systems though I’ve never seen one in the wild,”
Way to sexy this topic up buddy.
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Don’t worry. The police have back doors nobody could ever penetrate! Kind of like a good guy with a gun.
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If the black hats really got their shit together and decided to bring our civilization to its knees we’d all be screwed… just screwed.
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reads headline
Must be Tuesday.
so, basically as ficking busted and budget-starved as the physical infrastructure.
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They’re not /only/ infecting infrastucture. A decent botnet could form quite the mining pool, and it only has to pay out to the botmaster. Estimates on botnet sizes have come from times where people have managed to seize the control site, or they’ve been used to DDOS.
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Largely speaking, the competent bad guys seem to just be looking for a payout. There aint no money in bringing civilisation to its knees. We do have to worry if the bad guys ™ get competent.
Maybe I don’t know enough about computers, but… why doesn’t an institution with absurd amounts of supercomputing power like IBM, Livermore, or Los Alamos just do some ‘fundraising’ and put an end to all of this cryptomining?
Am I severely underestimating the amount of power consumed for mining?
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Yeah, on the whole it’s getting some mining done, but on the individual level, of the systems it’s infecting, the damage it’s creating is so far beyond whatever value it’s generating. Though I suppose that’s true in general - the cost of having, and dealing with, infected systems exceeds whatever kind of money the botmasters are making.
Yes, I believe so. We’re talking the amount of energy used by a decent-sized country, and rising.
Because in the West the electricity costs more than your expected return in coins. And realistically you want specialised hardware, which is constantly sold out. So you’ve basically got server farms centrally running a decentralised system in China.
Yeah, now that you say that, I recall a friend was designing a circuitboard for a bitcoin mining startup back in 2013. A tiny little 2"x2" square apparently had some 800 amps running through it.
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