Wherever there is a currency or a financial transaction online there will be attempts at cyber crime. This is a given and luckily for Online Poker players it's less of a concern due to the encrypted technology every single room uses when processing payments via any method. It's not just online of course, your card details are at risk, to a certain degree whenever you use them. Bitcoin however is different in that the currency is 100% online, it's exchanged peer to peer online, it's used for purchases with merchants online and it's stored online. Every single time you use Bitcoins it will be online. Observers predicted hacking in its various forms and they were not wrong. Recently we have seen attacks on the Bitcoin exchange, and Instawallet has attracted lost of unwanted attention from cyber-criminals. Now there is a new threat and anyone that uses Skype is, to a certain degree, open to it. This is not like the previous attacks, as they were DDoS attacks, disruption of service attacks which slow the sites down to an unusable level, this new threat is that of malware to internet users.
The latest threat sends malware using Skype to spread a code that infects laptops, P.C's etc and suggest that the users click on links. It's primary purpose is to mine Bitcoins and it's spreading very quickly, so quickly in fact that it has made mainstream news in some parts of the world. Thousands of victims have already clicked on malicious links that in turn have been sent to all Skype contacts, and latest estimates believe that the links are getting around 2,000 clicks an hour. Without going into too much technical detail, what a part of the malware package does is to use the infected computer to mine for Bitcoins. The only way that you may know if your computer is infected or not is that you see it working extremely hard, getting a little hot and maybe somewhat slower than usual. This was of course predicted and as mentioned at the beginning of this article, anywhere that there is a chance to make money from cyber crime, there will be be attempts made to do it. Crime does indeed follow money and at the moment experts believe that this virtual currency offers many opportunities for the less savory internet users among us.
