Slashdot Mirror
Former Fed Employee Fined $5,000 For Installing Bitcoin Software On Server (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A former Federal Reserve employee was sentenced Friday to 12 months probation and a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty in October to installing unauthorized software on a computer server at the U.S. central bank. Nicholas Berthaume, who as a communications analyst had access to computer servers at the Fed's Board of Governors in Washington, installed software that connected to an online bitcoin network in order to earn units of the digital currency, according to a statement Monday from the central bank's Office of Inspector General. Berthaume also "modified certain security safeguards so that he could remotely access the server from home," the statement said. When confronted, he tried to cover up his actions by deleting the software; eventually he was fired and admitted guilt, the office said. His actions didn't result in the loss of any Fed information, and the board has enhanced security since the incident, the internal watchdog said. The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled).
Why bother? It is not like those servers can compete with ASIC mining anyway...
You may not create money! What do you think this is the federal reserve bank or something?
Admin rights to a server? Tru firewall and proxy? Seriously? Shitty secutity at it's finnest!
Reminds me of that guy who got sacked a while back for loading SETI at Home on a bunch of servers at his work.
Is it really that hard to remember that the computers at your employer's company are not yours?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Shitty secutity at it's finnest!
He got caught.
How ironic!....looking for MONEY(bit coin), by using the federal reserve bank computer server. Love it!
Good thing we didn't live in this environment at the "dawn of networked computing" in the 80's. Most of the muds ran at the behest of unix sys-admins at Universities... under the radar of the University Dept Heads in most cases.
Admin rights to a server?
You don't need admin privileges to mine bitcoins. A normal user login is enough.
Tru firewall and proxy? Seriously?
Even a web browser can do that. Where I work, this many people are unable to access outside servers: 0.
I looked into it out of curiosity about a year ago and concluded that I could make somewhere around $5 - $15 a month, while spending more on power. It long stopped being worth mining with common hardware.
Of course using someone else's equipment you don't have that downside, but those consequences far outweigh whatever pocket cash he made from it, unless it was installed on an entire cluster.
One sucker after the other...
FIRE HIM !!!
Put him in jail.
This is 1000 times worse than anything Hillary was accused of.
JUST PROBATION????
That 's CRAZY.
Where I work, this many people are unable to access outside servers: 0.
How many of them can connect to inside servers (DMZ does not count) from the outside?
He installed this crap on a computer server at the U.S. central bank.
Not his home computer but a server at the U.S. central bank.
in small businesses and even medium sized enterprises where a small number of admins are gods (no regular outside audits) or security is weak to non-existent. I wouldn't be shocked if billion in electricity was being siphoned off like this illegally annually.
The only reason he probably got caught is one of:
1) An IDS that said, "this looks weird, this server has a few hundred connections open. Admin, please look further into this!"
2) Someone inspecting processes on the server and being like, "bitcoin.exe?? What's that?"
This guy in not the first and will not the last "cowboy". I have been in a meeting where a leader in the organization revealed that his staff connected from home into a government network. He laughed, put his finger to his lips to tell those in the room to be quiet about it.
He was a Communications Analyst, so I'm not at all surprised that he had access to the servers. But, again, while the eeeevil hacker getting access to your computer(s) is the thing that makes the news, most problems occur because of some employee, disgruntled or not, pulls something like this simply because they can.
If Fed TI security is worth more than handfull of candies a normal user shouldn't even be able to login on a server. Access it from inside would be bad enough but it was from outside of all places (according to TFA).
If anything it shows that Fed has (or had) no change approval workflow to speak of and servers are (were) just glorified desktops inside a datacenter.
Is there anyone who would seriously buy those bullshit bitsy shekels?
Today's current exchange rate is 5.41 coins for $5000.00.
The article doesn't say how long he had the system running. But if it had any serious processing power, and he got 1 coin per month for six months? That's breaking even.
If he managed to do it longer than six months, then that's a profit, especially since he didn't tie up too much time in court trying to plead not guilty.
I would say, "Not bad!", but we don't know how long he was running the software. And he's not likely to say, either.
[End Of Line]
The "Shaggy defense" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Wasn't_Me.
Bonus geek factoid I just learned: Huttese version of the song was played in The Force Awakens. Maybe Abrams *was* trolling us...
Let's try that again shall we?
1) They haven't found any evidence of data being lost
2) They lost a lot of data but prefer not to admit it....
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!
A reasonable punishment for a digital crime.
You don't get to do that.
This isn't just any bank it's the federal reserve. Do they not pay their staff enough to make this sort of thing a deterrence in itself? Apparently not. What was the risk of $5K vs his salary. Risk far outweighed the reward no matter how you look at it. Brings up an interesting thought about the culture there if he thought he'd get away with it...
can he pay the fine with bitcoins ?!?
Don't all Americans owe the federal reserve several 10's of thousands now? We gotta have those trillion dollar F-35 fighter jets... better "print" up some more electronic money and send another I-owe-you to the Fed.
How does this work?
Was the employee first fined, then put on probation, then eventually fired?!
Is the employee fired after the 12 months probation?!
Did the (sentencing) entity change their minds on this?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.