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Kaspersky Lab and Interpol researcher Vitaly Kamluk has created an experimental computer virus that could enter PCs connected to the blockchain. He presented it at the Black Hat conference in Singapore.

Kamluk announced his demo on Twitter:

Vitaly Kamluk is Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab. Currently, he is on a secondment with Interpol. According to Forbes, he created a virus that can invade computers through their connection to the blockchain.

Kamluk demonstrated a virus that can attack computers that control certain bitcoin addresses to his audience. The malicious app selects some pieces of code from the publicly available information and then combines them to make a new bitcoin transaction with malware embedded in it. After the recipient receives this transaction, the virus can “steal data or scoop up passwords with keyloggers”.

Forbes report that during his demonstration at the BlackHat Conference, Vitaly Kamluk managed to recover some information from Metasploit, a hacker tool. According to the researcher, such attacks would also work with any blockchain-based cryptocurrency.

Vitaly Kamluk joined Kaspersky Lab in 2005 as an Infrastructure Services Developer for the Antivirus lab. In 2010, Vitaly spent time working in Japan as a Chief Malware Expert. He specializes in threats focusing on global network infrastructures. It is not clear when he began working for Interpol, but the secondment would appear to have started in November 2014.

There are many viruses that use bitcoin in some  way. CoinFox recently reported on a virus that blocked computers of a New Jersey school district and demanded 500 bitcoins from teachers. Another virus turned the computers of torrent users into Litecoin miners. The “Blockchain Virus” is a long-time bogey of the bitcoin community. Kamluk is the first to create a working prototype of this dreaded malware.