Skype malware mines for bitcoins at your expense

Dmitry Bestuzhev of Kaspersky Labs reported that there is malware virus being spread via social engineering abusing infected Skype accounts by sending massive messages to the contacts like these ones:

- I don't think i will ever sleep again after seeing this photo http://www.goo.gl/XXXXX?image=IMG0540250-JPG
- tell me what you think of this picture i edited http://www.goo.gl/XXXXX?image=IMG0540250-JPG

The spread looks to have become active around March 1st and
Kaspersky discovered and named the trojan: Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt. while most of the victims come from Russia and the Ukraine, there is information that China, Italy, Bulgaria and Taiwan have also been hit quite hard.

The visual basic based virus looks to be spreading at about 2000 clicks per hour and is targeting machines to mine for bitcoins.

TNW says the initial trojan is downloaded from a server located in India, and many anti-malware programs as measured by VirusTotal didn’t detect it. Once the machine is infected, the trojan drops multiple other pieces of malware, using Hotfile to grab the bits and also connecting to a server located in Germany for further instructions.

As we have said in the past do not click on random or suspicious looking links. To date approximately 170,000 Skype users have fallen victim to this scam.