am curious which if any android AV providers caught this
Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
11–20 of 94 posts
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#12This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there. It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before).…
It's still stupid. Mobile devices are orders of magnitudes worse than PCs at the integer arithmetic required for cryptocurrency mining.
only a brewing threat til it becomes a force. innovator's dilemma.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#13This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there. It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before).…
It's still stupid. Mobile devices are orders of magnitudes worse than PCs at the integer arithmetic required for cryptocurrency mining.
But you have orders of magnitude more of them. Slaved mobile devices are orders of magnitude cheaper, too!
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#14This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there. It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before).…
Electricity and bandwidth are both resources that most people have to pay for, I would consider this theft and not a "victimless crime".
The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant. If I steal tiny amounts of money ~0.01c from large amounts of people and accrued significant wealth from it, is it fine? Is it a "victimless crime" because the amount is so small?
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#15This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there. It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before).…
Electricity and bandwidth are both resources that most people have to pay for, I would consider this theft and not a "victimless crime". The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant. If I steal tiny amounts of money ~0.01c from large amounts of people and accrued significant wealth from it, is it fine? Is it a "victimless crime" because the amount is so small?
> The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant.
Not if it actually damage some parts of the phone like the battery because you have to charge it more often.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#16I wonder if one could create a pyramid scheme app out of this? An invite only one.
1st guy - 100% mining load & all profit.
2nd and 3rd guy split the mining load and 99.99% of the profit.
and so on...
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still stupid. Mobile devices are orders of magnitudes worse than PCs at the integer arithmetic required for cryptocurrency mining.
But you have orders of magnitude more of them. Slaved mobile devices are orders of magnitude cheaper, too!
>But you have orders of magnitude more of them.
Not according to this: http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/M...
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#18I wonder if one could create a pyramid scheme app out of this? An invite only one. 1st guy - 100% mining load & all profit. 2nd and 3rd guy split the mining load and 99.99% of the profit. and so on...
wait... forget invite only - anyone could download.
Your rank would depend upon how early you became a member and how often you leave the app running. The mining load would increase/decrease depending upon how many users are running the app at the time.
Also, place ads on the app.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#19I've been working on an idea similar to this for a few months. Instead of limiting this to crypto currency mining (a fair application, FWIW), why not approach this with the idea that people plugging in their phones every night could easily constitute the largest distributed supercomputer ever built? Everyone has the same nightly ritual: Wake up, use phone/tablet/device, plug in at night. Once it's plugged in, your phone charges to 100% after a few hours, and then essentially sits there for x hours effectively doing nothing (that's a little sensationalist, but it highlights my point). Folding@Home, et al have done this before, but the silver bullet here is that no one turns off their phone when it charges at night - perhaps to maintain the off chance they receive a random 4 AM phone call.
Now if you can combine this with an SDK (say... something Javascript based) that makes it easy to write/deploy compute jobs/"apps", you have a real distributed computing platform. You can also maintain security by using a similar proof-of-work scheme that bitcoin uses to prevent fraudulent mining.
The real challenge here is incentivizing people to run your app. Here's my sign up form for an early private beta for anyone who is interested.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity and bandwidth are both resources that most people have to pay for, I would consider this theft and not a "victimless crime". The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant. If I steal tiny amounts of money ~0.01c from large amounts of people and accrued significant wealth from it, is it fine? Is it a "victimless crime" because the amount is so small?
> The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant. Not if it actually damage some parts of the phone like the battery because you have to charge it more often.
You seem to mean "negligible", which is a different meaning than "irrelevant"; the point that was being made is that even if it were a "negligible" amount, the crime is not "victimless", hence the amount of the theft is "irrelevant": the point you seem to be making is that it might be a non-"negligible" amount, which is probably true, but at this point in the thread unrelated, and in fact according to the post you are responding to, "irrelevant" ;P.