full-disclosure - Re: Hacked servers mining for bitcoins?

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Message-ID: <20110720222244.GA26393@hexapodia.org>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:22:44 -0700
From: Andy Isaacson <adi@...apodia.org>
To: Robin <robin@...ec.net>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: Hacked servers mining for bitcoins?

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 08:48:38PM +0100, Robin wrote:
> Has anyone seen this before? Can you make more money from generating
> bitcoins on a hacked server than sending spam from it?

A quad-core Core i7 earns around .00042 BitCoin per day doing pooled
mining, currently, if I did my sums right.  At current exchange rate
that's around 0.6 cents per day.

So, I doubt that mining on a random server's CPU is worth the effort.

If there is a GPU in the server, then it can mine more productively; to
pick a commodity machine at random, one of my boxes with a $100 ATI GPU
can earn around .03 BitCoin at 80 Mhash/sec, or 40 cents per day at
current exchange rates.  At that number it starts to make economic sense
to pwn mining boxes; if an attacker installed mining software on 1,000
nodes with GPUs like my $100 ATI, they'd be generating around $10k per
month at the current exchange rate.

-andy

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