uTorrent silently installing bundled Bitcoin mining software

uTorrent silently installing bundled Bitcoin mining software

| Source: Trusted Reviews Author: Mark Campbell

uTorrent silently installing bundled Bitcoin mining software

It seems that the BitTorrent client uTorrent has silently installed Bitcoin mining software on it's users computers, without it's users knowledge or permission. You have been warned.

The bitcoin software which has been added to the latest version of uTorrent is called EpicScale, which is a bitcoin miner which uses your "unused processing power to change the world". Many users of uTorrent found the addition "easily noticable by the increased CPU load when the computer is idle".

The largest problem with the addition of this bitcoin mining software is that users of uTorrent were not asked if they wanted it during installation or that it was included in the installation, which means that the software was installed without their expressed permission/ consent.

The build of uTorrent in question is version 3.4.2 build 28913 (32-bit), an uTorrent employee did say that you could simply delete the EpicScale software from your PC and it would not try to reinstall itself.

"Feel free to delete this folder. You certainly won’t see any persistent auto-reinstalls of the software, it will be gone from your machine for good.”

The problem with this statement is that users report that this is simply not true and that it does not uninstall completely using add/remove program on Windows or by deleting the application folder.

This comes not long after the Lenovo PR disaster which was SuperFish, when they installed an adware program on some of their consumer PC, which left their PCs vulnerable and insecure, not to mention the fact that this was unknown to many users.

The installation of programs onto a computer without the users consent or permission is simply put wrong, as it can leave PC vulnerable to attack or at a minimum degrade the PCs performance by wasting CPU cycles and/or storage space.

I advise all users of uTorrent or similar softwares to be careful that your systems are secure, until uTorrent remove the program or update it's installation process.

You can join the discussion on uTorrent adding a Bitcoin miner to it's client on the OC3D Forums.

Special thanks to the Forum user Dark Night for bringing this news to my attention.

the BitTorrent client uTorrent has added a Bitcoin miner to user PCs without their permission http://t.co/yApTpV5smW pic.twitter.com/0zR4gEPk8d — OC3D (@OC3D) March 6, 2015

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