Popular competitive gaming league ESEA caught sneaking a Bitcoin miner on their clients machines.
Basically this is about as bad if not worse than Sony’s rootkit fiasco years ago. A competitive gaming league which charges its members 7 dollars per month and has 15000 active members snuck a bitcoin miner onto the gaming client which activates 10 minutes after a system goes idle.
Now bitcoin mining is extremely taxing on people GPU’s which not only uses power but has a risk of damaging hardware which it has done to a fair few users. GPU manufacturers also tend not to refund cards which were damaged by bit coin mining. The admins were notified of their client using a lot of resources weeks ago but only after someone actually had proof they were bitcoin mining they admitted it was happening.
They first claimed it was an April fools joke which went wrong and it was a mistake they released this client and only mined 100 dollars worth and for a few days. Then after it was proved they mined a lot more they admitted to 3000 dollars worth and was exceeding 2 weeks.
Anyway for a company that is already charging 15000 members 7 dollars a month membership this kind of behaviour is disgusting and I hope their league has a slow death. There is no chance this was an accident because of the amount of work involved to get this up and running.
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