Computer security firms have done a good job about alerting Mac OS X users of the appearance of a sophisticated new piece of malware, the “DevilRobber” trojan, which turns infected users’ machines into unwitting Bitcoin miners.
But one of the programmers behind the crypto-currency wasn’t even aware of the trojan until TPM emailed him.
As Wladimir J. van der Laan, Bitcoin programmer and system software engineer at Dutch lithography giant ASML, wrote to TPM, “This is the first time I [heard] of it…”
Laan also didn’t seem particularly concerned about the trojan, which according to security firms Sophos and Intego, has only infected a few users so far by entering through pirated image editing software GraphicConverter 7.4 on torrent websites.
“People trying to rob other’s bitcoins is a logical consequence of bitcoin becoming more well-known,” van der Laan wrote. “I don’t expect this specific incident to have much impact. The infection vector is pretty rare (mac only, packaged with specific pirated software).”
As one of our readers isepick pointed out on Monday, “the guys programming bitcoin can do very little about someone writing a virus to mine with. Kind of like asking the Federal Reserve what they are going to do about you getting mugged.”
As for what Bitcoin users should do to avoid having their own virtual wallets robbed by DevilRobber, which also locates and saves the infected user’s stash of any Bitcoins, van der Laan did have some advice to offer.
“We encourage the user to use wallet encryption, and to not store large amounts of bitcoins on PCs that they use for other purposes such as web surfing,” van der Laan explained.
Bitcoin’s own Wiki on wallet security offers a step-by-step guide to protecting wallets on Linux, Windows and Mac machines. In the case of Macs, the process involves creating an encrypted disk image and moving the entire Bitcoin data files over to it.
In November, Bitcoin enthusiasts and leaders in the evolving market are meeting in Prague for the 2011 European Bitcoin Conference. Bitcoin mining is one of the featured topics for discussion. We’ll keep you posted on that when it rolls around.
