µTorrent latest victim of crapware paranoia

BitTorrent Inc. has been accused of loading its popular µTorrent BitTorrent client with cryptocoin miners that install silently and then harvest the processor power of unwitting torrenters.

Users of the software created a thread on the official µTorrent forum to complain about a high processor load when the computer is idle. The culprit was a program called Epic Scale, installed alongside µTorrent.

Epic Scale is a distributed computing client from a company that claims it wants to harness “unused processing power to change the world.” The website says that it uses the processors of machines with the software to solve “math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more,” and this computation is monetized. Currently, it appears that the software is mining the Litecoin cryptocurrency.