8 January 2014 Last updated at 17:29 GMT

Yahoo malware enslaves PCs to Bitcoin mining

By Jane Wakefield

Technology reporter

Adverts on Yahoo's homepage were infected with malware designed to mine the Bitcoin virtual currency, according to security experts.

Yahoo confirmed that for a four-day period in January, malware was served in ads on its homepage.

Experts estimate that as many as two million European users could have been hit.

Security firm Light Cyber said the malware was intended to create a huge network of Bitcoin mining machines.

"The malware writers put a lot of effort into making it as efficient as possible to utilise the computing power in the best way," Light Cyber's founder Giora Engel told the BBC.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25653664

-- BBC 2014-01-08

I am sure that this is neither a new or a one off thing. Most users nowadays have no idea what else their pc is doing at any given moment.

Removed an off-topic post and the reply to it.

I am sure that this is neither a new or a one off thing. Most users nowadays have no idea what else their pc is doing at any given moment.

have way too many unknown 'services' running in win 7

It is astonishing to see in the Task Manager how many services are loaded, most of them running, some stopped. Right now, there are 155 on my laptop.

Whenever I have some doubt about a process or service in that list, I look it up on the web with the query "What is [service name]?" and one of the first items in the search result usually gives me the answer, for example this answer for the service LanmanWorkstation:

technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc959546.aspx

Should I be unable to find an answer or should the answers be too technical for me to understand I would start a topic in this forum to ask about it.