{"id":13686,"date":"2015-03-13T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T10:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=13686"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:01:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T19:01:26","slug":"popular-torrent-client-can-steal-your-cpu-cycles-to-mine-bitcoins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/popular-torrent-client-can-steal-your-cpu-cycles-to-mine-bitcoins","title":{"rendered":"Popular torrent client can steal your CPU cycles to mine bitcoins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"byline-container\"><span class=\"by\">by<\/span> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/about\/editors\/steve-dent\/\" data-image=\"http:\/\/www.blogcdn.com\/www.engadget.com\/media\/2013\/10\/steve-headshot-04440x350_24x24.jpg\"><strong>Steve Dent<\/strong><\/a><\/span> \u2014 Engadget<br \/>\n<br \/> If you recently installed or updated <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/09\/06\/utorrent-beta-app-arrives-on-android\/\">uTorrent<\/a> on your PC, you may have have picked up an unwanted passenger: a bitcoin miner called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/library\/file\/EpicScale.exe-153377\/\" target=\"_blank\">Epic Scale<\/a>. If you don\u2019t pay attention, that piece of code can be inadvertently installed with the latest uTorrent build (version 3.4.2). It can then use your computer as part of a bitcoin farm (Litecoin, to be exact) to generate revenue for third parties. Users first reported the situation on <a href=\"http:\/\/forum.utorrent.com\/topic\/95041-warning-epicscale-riskware-silently-installed-with-latest-utorrent\/\" target=\"_blank\">uTorrent\u2019s forums<\/a>, and it was quickly confirmed by a senior support manager. He said that the app \u201ccannot be installed without permission,\u201d but one user claimed that there was \u201cnever a warning about it,\u201d even though he opted out of other bundled software.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2015\/03\/06\/utorrent-bitcoin-miner\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Steve Dent \u2014 Engadget If you recently installed or updated uTorrent on your PC, you may have have picked up an unwanted passenger: a bitcoin miner called Epic Scale. If you don\u2019t pay attention, that piece of code can be inadvertently installed with the latest uTorrent build (version 3.4.2). It can then use your [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1318],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bitcoin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13686"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64808,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13686\/revisions\/64808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}