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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."
Depends on how you define malware. Some people would consider malware to be anything that runs on your computer without permission or knowledge. The "mal" part would be where it uses your system resources that could otherwise be allocated to programs you want to run.
Before know-nothing morons start commenting on this article, here's some truth from an actual bitcoin miner. Mining software has no public facing interface when ran from a website. He also was not trying to send out a virus to mine for him or he'd be arrested and fired. He was simply using the CPU and GPU cycles to mine coins and make money.
This is exceptionally stupid because if it was CPU mining, well my i5 chip can hit 8 million hashes per second and my single overclocked 5830 Radeon card can hit 315 million, making it almost 40x faster. So assuming it was a faster modern Xeon, let's say 2x the speed, if the company owned 40 servers and he ran it nonstop on all of them at 100% CPU usage (not likely) then he should have instead bought 1 5830 for about $90 on ebay and mined coins himself. What an idiot.
It is possible that the servers had AMD/ATI cards that he was using without much performance impact on the website(s) but google "bitcoin hardware mining comparison" to see just how awful cards that aren't optimized for gaming do at mining.
Busy computers consume more electricity. And electricity costs real money. Now some this up over all the customer who unknowingly lost a couple of cents like this, and suddenly we are talking real money. One of the rare cases where the "theft" label is appropriate for a digital crime.
So while someone may not get in trouble for using their FOUO car for groceries on the way home from work
That's almost the definition of why they give you a TDY car, not abuse of the system at all. Been there driven that. It was not a snazzy lexus but some POS falling apart compact chevy for me. The scandal is why its a lexus, not why its at the grocery store. Cheaper for the .gov to essentially be its own leasing company than for them to reimburse you for a rental or endless taxi. Also think about it... if you bring donuts to a official meeting at any time during your TDY, that grocery trip was now official business. Sgt merely told me not to do anything I wouldn't want my mom to see on the front page of the paper (now a days they probably say on facebook or whatever). This was nearly 20 years ago, things may be different now.
You end up in some pretty twisted logic if you give TDY people a car and pay them a TDY per-diem specifically for food that they can only spend on foot, or something weird like that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Harsh punishment is always popular. People like retribution, whether it makes sense or not.
Never mind if no harm was caused, never mind if it was just a silly lapse in judgement. Fire people, prosecute them, send them to jail....why? Because you can?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"