BadLepricon?
Are we looking for a dyslexic Irish person here?
Bitcoin mining on low-powered devices these days is a bad idea, to say the least. As cryptocurrency blockchains grow more complex, even high-powered dedicated mining rigs are having trouble effectively mining coins. Your smartphone, therefore, is going to be about as useful for mining Bitcoin as soup ladle is for mining actual …
You really won't, they just don't have the muscle to contribute anything effective.
You must have missed the part of the report where it says the software scales back processor usage to try and hide, so every infected handset is only going to be running at 50% anyway.
You would actually need at least a million strong botnet to see anything.
Thats even before you consider that bitcoins are getting worth less and less as time go's on, they've lost about 60% in six months - hardly a good indicator for the future.
... when I was teaching my youngest brother's kids the concept of panning gold when camping out along the San Joaquin River, I used the ladle from the pot of chili that we were cleaning to demonstrate. We managed to find six small flakes of gold ...
That's solid wealth (for small quantities of wealth).
Bitcoin? Not so much. I'll use virtual currency when I see value in virtual beer.
Six little flakes of gold are still only six little flakes of metal. The value of which is defined by what exactly? Well, seeing as you found these flakes with your brothers children (iirc) these flakes have a high sentimental value to you, but would anyone else care about them? Would someone give you beer for these little flakes of metal?
"...the malware spreads from a series of applications that have since been removed from the Google Play store."
".....users can help avoid infections on the smartphones by disabling "unknown source" installations in their smartphone settings and only installing apps from trusted vendors and stores."
-The Google play store is now both an unknown source and an untrusted vendor? who knew!
According to the hashing rates here :
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ARM
We could expect 1.3MH/s from a dual core A9 based phone like the Samsung SII. With a Samsung SIII that could probably go up to ~4MH/s (quad core, faster clock speed) and an S5 probably 8-10MH/s tops (Snapdragon 801 running at 2.5Ghz should at least double over an A9 at 1.9Ghz). All of this is contingent on optimising the program carefully for different CPU architectures (A9, Krait etc) and would require the CPU to stay awake and run at it's maximum frequency / voltage the entire time.
Using figures from here:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
Assuming that you infected 1000 Samsung Galaxy S5's at 10MH/s or so you'd get 10,000MH/s which if you could somehow keep all the phones going for 24 hours in a row non stop (in practice they'd die in a few hours due to battery drain) would net you a whopping 0.33USD for that time period at current rates... in future that will go down.
So, 10/10 for inventive use of malware.... 0/10 for use of basic arithmetic!