IoT Botnet Mirai Now Forces Smart Appliances to Mine Bitcoin

Earlier this year, I declared the Internet of Things had officially hit peak stupid, courtesy of a new smart toaster being shown at CES. I should have known better. What’s even more useless than a smart toaster? A smart toaster that’s been hacked to mine Bitcoin.

- Joel Hruska

This is a concept as incomprehensible as it is stupid. Seven years ago, mining bitcoins on CPUs was totally a thing people did. Six years ago, GPUs such as AMD’s HD 5000 series were tearing up the hash charts. Four to five years ago, you could still earn some money mining on GPUs, but the specter of custom built ASICs was rising, and those offer performance benefits no GPU could compete with.

 

According to IBM’s X-Force initiative, there was a brief spike in a specific variant of Mirai that carries a crypto currency mining payload, possibly deployed as a proof-of-concept solution. Here’s how X-Force describes the Bitcoin-mining version: