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ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner
- mooism2 14y agoRedirects to welcome page.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- saurik 14y agoOne of the times that I accessed this page I was given this error, for people who aren't using a browser capable of detecting this kind of thing (although I don't know how serious these detections really are). Danger: Malware Ahead! Chromium has blocked access to this page on play.esea.net. Content from bjskosherbaskets.com, a known malware distributor, has been inserted into this web page. Visiting this page now is very likely to infect your Mac with malware.
- ninguem2 14y agoIs this for real? I just went to this page on a mac. Did not get any warning or any other signs. What should I look for? Finally can the mods please remove this link, if this is confirmed?
- saurik 14y agoThe second time I accessed it I did not get that; I imagine it is from some kind of rotated-in advertisement provider (although I don't see any ads).
- kosei 14y agoI got the same issue. So I decided not to read the article...
- chriscampbell 14y agoGot the same Malware warning from Google Chrome
- stoic 14y agoThis subscription has been cancelled.
- stoic 14y agowell, looks like word travels fast: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=492152 http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4...
- Pyramids 14y agoThis is about as bad as you can get for any kind of software developer. I'd rather run an installer that tries to install a toolbar than one that secretly mines Bitcoins. At least those which bundle toolbars generally inform you and provide an opt-out. Although IANAL, the legality of this is highly questionable, considering the recent (mis?)usage of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and the fact that nothing in their EULA/ToS permits this kind of use case.
- nyar 14y agoFrom what I understand the guy who runs ESEA is pretty much saying "Yeah, we were talking about this one day and did it. Now you've caught us, so we'll be removing it and giving everyone a free month. We also made $3000 something dollars by mining with your computers, but we don't want you to be mad at us, so we won't do it again. But we totally had no problem with this earlier."
- luke_s 14y agoDo you have a link to that post on the forum? I don't feel like digging through 4 pages of replies to find it.
- UberMouse 14y agohttp://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=492152 http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4...
- endianswap 14y agoHe's also claiming that all of the money made this way will be put into a tournament prize pool, but still, that doesn't justify the behavior or attitude.
- leethax0r 14y agoHe also said that it was an accident and not meant to be pushed to all the users.
- Cthulhu_ 14y agoFor correctness' sake, they didn't make $3000, they made 30 BTC, which could be sold on the market for approximately $3000 at the current rates, minus transaction fees and plus or minus market fluctuations.
- shitlord 14y agoThis isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it has been a problem shared by many anti-cheat clients: they're all a bit too trigger-happy, even though they shouldn't be holding that gun in the first place. And if that wasn't bad enough, these clients are also notoriously buggy. They will corrupt the state of your kernel (they will do things like overwrite entries in your SDT/SSDT, making various system calls fail; in fact, it's very common practice for some of these tools to outright disable the use of functions like NtOpenProcess or ZwWriteVirtualMemory, and then not even bother to reallow them after the anti-cheat client exits), they will litter your Windows folder, and wreak havoc however they want. And here's the kicker: these anti-cheat clients aren't even that effective if you know what you are doing.
- pale_rider 14y agoThe thread is closed, which links to an explanation, which is below: ----------------------------------- [lpkane] - 5.1.13 at 1:46am lol that got aggressive quickly back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included we ran the test for a few days on our accounts, decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought fast forward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are and the results for 48 hours of your combined efforts? http://www.picsend.net/images/923377coin.. http://www.picsend.net/images/923377coin... ~2 btc, or roughly $280 usd at current exchange rates, not bad! anyway, our bad, we just released a client update with the btc stuff removed, and your $280 is going into the s14 prize pot -- if you're still feeling sad, feel free to pm me and i'll attempt to buy back your love but for the record, i told jag he shouldn't be lazy and run the miner in a separate process, rookie move
- dvt 14y agoAnd then that thread was closed. And this one was opened: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=492152 http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4... Turns out the ~$280 turned into over $3,500. And the 48 hours turned into 8 days.
- makomk 14y agoYeah. Only after several people in the first thread figured out that their antivirus software had been detecting the miner for much longer than 48 hours, and one of them contacted the pool used to confirm how much had actually been made, though.
- luke_s 14y agoActually, there is a follow up to that: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=492152 http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4... ----------------------------------- [lpkane] 5.1.13 at 3:17am first make sure you read part 1 of this developing story: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&.. http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&... now for the more interesting news: 1. this has been running since april 14th, and definitely explains the virus warning due to the miner being a separate process 2. there were a total of 3 wallets on 3 pools set up for the test with the following addresses: - 50btc: 1NsEeuxWB4ZvjVrxZcsmeMktDJPG5m4NCn - btc guild: 13X5R8tTGkvZnsvFd12AHqwpF2hp34QKUa - slush pool: 1NLy5djpAeU7uVNQ8meLQ4CweFU1hNfkQP 3. over the 2+ weeks it was apparently running, a total of 29.27627734 btc was mined, way more than 1.9! 4. daily sweeps were set up which converted btc to usd, and transactions totaled $3,602.21 (just sold the remaining btc to get a total) so first the bad news, this is way more shady than i originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault now the good news, as of the client update released in the last hour, all the btc stuff is out which should solve the gpu and av warnings, and in a blatant attempt to buy back your love (and less likely your trust), i'm going to do the following: 1. 100% of the funds are going into the s14 prize pot, so at the very least your melted gpus contributed to a good cause 2. every user who was premium this month will get a free one month premium code which they can use whenever and for whomever they like, and you'll find the code under manage accounts -> premium codes once again, our bad, thanks for keeping us honest ----------------------------------- So, it turns out, it wasn't $280 worth of BTC that was mined, it was $3,602.21 . How you can 'accidentally' mine more than $3000 of BTC is beyond me!
- pcieee 14y agoMirror: http://www.webcitation.org/6GHYnetpc http://www.webcitation.org/6GHYnetpc and http://www.webcitation.org/6GHYhQL72 http://www.webcitation.org/6GHYhQL72
- makomk 14y agoFailed both times, only mirrored the splash page and not the forums.
- tantalor 14y agoI'll bite. Why not sell a service to a mining pool? Many services are free anyway. I'd fork over an hour of GPU per day to see fewer the ads.
- krichman 14y agoAn hour of GPU is not much. I think a single GPU can do a few Megahashes per second. To hit one BTC/day you would need about 20 Gigahashes per second all day. I think they'd make a bunch more by showing you the ads. http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
- lucb1e 14y agoBut 1btc/day is >$100/day. They don't make that much on a single client showing ads. More like $0.10 at most, or 0.001btc (which takes much less mining power).
- dreen 14y agoI don't know how popular their client is but I have a HD7970 which is not bad at all (enough to run any currently released game on full settings) and when I don't game I let it mine which gives me about $0.5 - $0.75 a day. I'm in it for the women tho not the money.
- joblessjunkie 14y agoAn HD7970 can peak at around 200W consumption, so the entire PC is probably consuming around 300W, or about 7kwh per day. I pay $.11 per kWH, so I would be losing money on the deal. Good luck with the women!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- seanp2k2 14y agoBTC mining on GPUs uses a ton of power, like quadruple-the-monthly-power-bill-in-your-apartment kind of power. If you're willing to pay the energy company and bring more harm to the environment for something, I don't feel like you're really thinking about the true cost. I'd rather just pay up-front on simple terms.
- DigitalSea 14y agoIt was only a matter of time before someone tried this, if I were in their position I would contemplate it too given the rise of the cost of a Bitcoin and they won't be the last to try something like this. I the day a widely used software application like uTorrent decides to remove the malware and banner ads and instead bundles in a Bitcoin miner that runs when your machine is mostly idle (like download a torrent over night).
- johnyzee 14y agoNew business model for games: Free-to-play with embedded Bitcoin miner!
- lifeformed 14y agoLet me provide some background on ESEA: It's a paid service ($7/month) that lets you set up competitive matches of Counter-strike (and TF2 and LoL) with other ESEA players. It has it's own ranking system, it's own league/ladder, and anti-cheat system. It has over 20,000 subscribers. It's the most popular of such services for Counter-strike, and has been around for many years. This incident is really serious. People have reported damaged hardware from this. Mining bitcoins can run quite hot if your system is not built for it. ESEA has been known for being scummy in the past - this is a huge breach of trust and security that I can't believe so many players are overlooking it. The worst part is their response to all of this. They're playing it off like a joke and think it's no big deal. The $3600 they made came at the expense of far more than $3600 in electricity costs from the community. They lied about the whole thing, and keep changing their story as people figure out more of it. There's more discussion on this on the csgo subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dgad2/esea_client_basically_a_virus/ http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dgad2/esea...
- jacobquick 14y agoShould change this link to an actual news item, currently it goes to their front page which of course provides no information. I know reddit's crappy but this post is actually doing a good job aggregating info as it becomes available: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_competitive_gaming_league_esea_admins/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_compet... This should probably be a really big story covered and analyzed by all the serious video game journalists... just kidding those don't exist. If we're lucky maybe Forbes will cover it or something.