No, it doesn't really work
By Shaun Nichols, 25 Apr 2014 Bitcoin mining on low-powered devices these days is a bad idea, to say the least. As cryptocurrency blockchains grow more complex, even high-powered dedicated mining rigs are having trouble effectively mining coins. Your smartphone, therefore, is going to be about as useful for mining Bitcoin as soup ladle is for mining actual gold.And yet, that hasn't stopped one optimistic malware writer from trying to turn an army of Android phones into a distributed cryptocoin mining rig.
Researchers with security firm Lookout have spotted malware targeting Android devices that looks to use the compute power of infected handsets to contribute to a Bitcoin mining system. Known as BadLepricon, the malware spreads from a series of applications that have since been removed from the Google Play store.
Once installed on a handset, the BadLepricon malware contacts a Stratum Bitcoin mining server that puts the phone's processor to use crunching numbers as part of a larger distributed mining effort.
The infection is not the first such attempt to pool handsets into a mining operation via malware. Last month, an infection known as CoinKrypt similarly hijacked phones to mine coins.
Full Article
The BitCoin scene seems to have gone very quiet since the recent revelations...and I am wondering if it has been somewhat over hyped?
