On Thu, 23 Feb 2012, James A. Donald wrote: [[for attacking bitcoin]] > botnets cannot compete with legit miners, because to get a reasonable return, > you need to mine with a graphics card, and while mining with graphics card, > your graphics goes to hell, which will cause the most slow witted owner of a > zombie computer to do something.
It's pretty easy for the botnet to monitor for human activity (e.g., mouse movement, non-screensaver processes running) and suspend their activity then. Since the computer is likely idle most of the time (I'm assuming bonets mainly use home computers, which will be idle when their owners are sleeping, and usually when owners are out at school/work/shopping/etc in the daytime), the botnet throughput is only modestly degraded. -- -- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <[email protected]> Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
