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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...
Curiosity: can I make it work and can I get away with it.
Value: it's free electricity.
Rick/reward fail: Failure to see the consequences of being caught will outweigh the likely reward.
It is quite surprising this hasn't happened more often, unless there's an interest in keeping the discovery and dismissal in house.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
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.
That's only if you're trying to make a profit out of mining and you have expenses like real estate, electricity, the mining hardware, etc.
If you didn't have all that overhead, CPU based mining is more than adequate, especially if you have free real estate, free electricity and free hardware. Sure you'll mine slowly, but it's all profit.
Some ransomware does this, as do many malware - when you have a botnet of 500,000 for free use, bitcoin mining isn't terribly bad, especially since it's all free to you.
100% Correct. Until drug dealers on the street start accepting Bitcoin for purchases, Its criminality hides in the shadow of the current USD. Im pretty sure you can buy drugs in almost any country on this planet with US Currency.