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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Tuesday, August 2, 2011
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Found: Bitcoin Mining Bot That is Controlled Via Twitter Posted by Mikko @ 13:24 GMT

Bitcoin is an electronic currency which is not tied in value to any other currencies. You can convert other currencies (like US dollars) to Bitcoins, or you can mine new Bitcoins by completing complex mathematical tasks.

This creates an incentive for botnet masters to use other people's computers to mine bitcoins for them. And we've seen a some examples of botnets that try to do this.

But now we've found a bot that uses Twitter as the control channel.

The bots are created with a generator. Generator sets a specific Twitter account to be the one which can be used to control the mining botnet.

SEKURITY TWEMINER

The commands follow a simple syntax.

SEKURITY TWEMINER

We detect bots generated with this generator as Trojan.Generic.KD.