μTorrent Silently Installing Bitcoin Mining Software 03-07-2015, 04:05 PM
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If you have recently installed or updated the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent 3.4.2 Build 28913 on your computer, then you read this warning post right now.
Users of the μTorrent file-sharing service are complaining that the latest update of software used for torrent downloading is silently installing a piece of unwanted software called EpicScale, which is basically a Bitcoin mining software.
The Epic Scale, installed without the consent of users, is a cryptocurrency mining software that reportedly uses the combined computing power of users to generate Bitcoin income for BitTorrent company. The unwanted software slows down the host computers and is particularly harder to remove from the system.
The Bitcoin mining software was recently highlighted at uTorrent’s complaint forum where a member ‘Groundrunner’ says: "There was no information about this during installation and I did opt out of your other bundled software."
A senior manager for customer support at uTorrent did reply to the thread, explaining that the designed the update to ensure partner software downloads ‘don’t occur without approval by the user’.
"Epic Scale is a great partner for us to continue to generate revenue for the company, while contributing funds to good causes," uTorrent employee wrote. "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."
Source: http://thehackernews.com/2015/03/beware-...lling.html
I had that particular version.
Uninstalled and moved to qBittorrent.
Your thoughts on this?