Symantec spots Trojan that harvests bitcoins

DailyTech writes Symantec has discovered a new Trojan that uses infected computers to mine bitcoins. Symantec researcher Peter Coogan estimates cyber criminals could earn close to $1 a month for every PC they manage to infect. Detection of the Trojan should be easier than with other Trojans because bitcoin mining heavily taxes the GPU, thus infected computers will likely produce lots of noise.

File this piece of trojan as an entrant for the title of the world's least subtle malware. Security researchers at Symantec Corp. (SYMC) have discovered a trojan, which they've dubbed "Trojan.badminer" [database entry], that exhibits a highly unusual attack behavior.

The trojan targets users’ GPUs and CPUs, using them in a botnet scheme. But rather than simply sending spam, like your average botnet, the attacker uses the infected machines as brute-force tools to mine for Bitcoins.