Employee "Disciplined" For Installing Bitcoin Software On Federal Webservers

Fluffeh writes "Around a year ago, a person working for the ABC in Australia with the highest levels of access to systems got caught with his fingers on the CPU cycles. The staffer had installed Bitcoin mining software on the systems used by the Australian broadcaster. While the story made a bit of a splash at the time, it was finally announced today that the staffer hadn't been sacked, but was merely being disciplined by his manager and having his access to systems restricted. All the stories seem a little vague as to what he actually installed, however — on one side he installed the software on a public facing webserver, and the ABC itself admits, 'As this software was for a short time embedded within pages on the ABC website, visitors to these pages may have been exposed to the Bitcoin software,' and 'the Coalition (current Opposition Parties) was planning on quizzing the ABC further about the issue, including filing a request for the code that would have been downloaded to users' machines,' but on the other side there is no mention of the staffer trying to seed a Bitcoin mining botnet through the site, just that mining software had been installed."

Comments

Re:Duh?

[PopeRatzo]

Government issued cars with "For Official Use Only" would seem to be an exception to that.

This only happens in government vehicles.

Nobody ever used a company car for anything but business. In fact, no teenager has ever borrowed the family car to "go to the store for grandma" and then picked up his pals, smoked some weed and then drove out to the Labaugh Forest Preserve parking lot to spin some donuts on the frozen pavement on January 23rd 1983.

That totally never happened.