Bitcoin: Monetising stolen cycles

At the current stratospheric value of Bitcoin, miners with access to significant computational horsepower are literally printing money. However, cybercriminals have also been drawn to this potentially lucrative endeavour and are leveraging the resources available to them: stolen CPU hours in the form of
botnets.

This research by Dr Sarah Meiklejohn and colleagues is the first comprehensive study of Bitcoin mining malware, and describes the infrastructure and mechanism deployed by several major players. By carefully reconstructing the Bitcoin transaction records, the amount of money a number of mining botnets have made can be deduced.

The full paper is available here.