This paper addresses the pre ASIC landscape. Stealing power from standard systems to mine bitcoin right now would be a complete waste of time, you would get alm

This paper addresses the pre ASIC landscape. Stealing power from standard systems to mine bitcoin right now would be a complete waste of time, you would get almost nothing from the package with even a ridiculous amount of standard systems. All heavy duty mining nowadays is done by ASICs, even high end dedicated GPU farms can't compete, letalone the kind of machines likely to fall victim to a botnet. If someone did try to hijack those ASICs, you can bet the people running the mining business would notice, assuming it were even possible. It's interesting how this might apply to an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining that a few have tried, however. This particular niche will always have this as a potential problem going forward.