The tactics used in Bitcoin thefts are fairly bold. According to a CSO article, E-Sports Entertainment admitted to “secretly installing Bitcoin mining software” on thousands of computers and has agreed to a $1 million settlement.
The anti-malware company Malwarebytes has released a warning about software that uses computers to mine Bitcoins. As The Guardian reported:
The program "installs a Bitcoin minter on the user system, not just for a quick buck but actually written into the software's EULA [End User License Agreement]. This type of system hijacking is just another way for advertising based software to exploit a user into getting even more cash."
The majority of computer users have no idea that their computer has been turned into a Bitcoin-mining zombie – after all, how many people read the EULA for software? However, a good anti-malware program should be able to find the malware and get rid of it.
On the positive side, The Guardian article added, developers may have outwitted themselves:
The amount of processing power now being used to try to mine Bitcoins have increased exponentially in the past year, so that it now requires dedicated ASIC processing rigs to generate Bitcoins in any reasonable period. It's now almost impossible to mine Bitcoins using a standard PC CPU - and even "botnets" of CPUs aren't able to compete against the dedicated rigs in terms of computing power.