On Dec 29, 2016, at 4:45 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 04:32:58AM -0500, John Newman wrote:
Are there stats about bitcoin fraud vs traditional financial fraud? Decentralization complicates things. Especially about fraud done by malware.
I don't have stats but i know that fucking worm PhotoMiner (a monero miner propagated through FTP amongst other methods) is endemic... There are a lot of dumb shits mining monero without knowing it.
I still see it banging on the door of FTP server trying to upload itself (and failing and getting blocked) from at least a few hosts every day.
Mining bitcoins without knowing it is essentially non-issue compared to stealing the bitcoin wallet or abusing some subtle ``feature" of Bitcoin.
Sure, wallet theft is more akin to a heist and could net massive gains if you pick your target well. Is there any malware that actively looks for and steals wallets? I don't know, probably. Still, with a big enough bot net doing your mining and paying for the wattage i imagine it adds up. I wouldn't mind owning one :) It seems bitcoin is pretty resilient to other attacks on subtle features... although i'm not that well versed in the subject.