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Well, we've seen past stories on viruses co-opting Raspberry Pi units to mine cryptocurrency, and websites mining a few coins on their viewers' systems, but it took some crafty boffins in Russia to really give the issue some scale. International Business Times has the story, dated 9 Feb 2018...
Russian security officials arrested a number of scientists working at a secret Russian nuclear weapons facility for allegedly using lab equipment to mine for cryptocurrencies, according to Russia's Interfax News Agency.
[The facility's computers are] supposed to be isolated; they are kept disconnected from the internet in order to prevent any outside intrusion or hacking efforts. That was violated by the engineers who decided to use the supercomputer rigs to mine for cryptocurrency.
Mining for cryptocurrency requires a considerable amount of processing power—something the average computer might struggle to provide but a supercomputer designed for work on nuclear weapons surely has the capacity for.
The story does not specify the cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies the scientists were trying to mine, nor whether any mining was successful.
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Saturday February 10 2018, @11:56PM (2 children)
Probably almost none. The thing about Bitcoin mining is that while speed matters, cost per computation is more important. ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) miners are far more efficient at mining cryptocurrency in terms of both the initial hardware cost and the number of hashes per unit of electricity consumed than supercomputers. Cryptomining is an embarrassingly parallel problem where just having a large stack of capable computers is good enough and the operations are purely bit manipulation. The capabilities of supercomputers would be wasted on this problem.
Where I think one would use supercomputers or any other collection of computing power is if they already have the hardware and aren't paying extra for electricity consumed. If the machine will run and burn electricity anyway, whether you do something on the machine or not, you might as well be mining bitcoins during downtime. And if a system admin can illegally sneak bitcoin mining on the system, then they sure won't be the ones paying for the electricity.
For me, the most interesting part of this story is the security aspect. This is the highest security system that I've heard of being compromised in this way. But with the current high price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency variants, it's likely to become a persistent problem and become yet another danger to worry about. For the enterprising computer cracker, it's a vulnerability to look for. Actually creating a compromised client would be the most sophisticated sort of attack, but one could also just listen in on a downwind network for bitcoin traffic. For systems hooked directly to the internet, you could find access to them in this way (and maybe get some idea of the amount of computation power available to those systems).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:16AM (1 child)
One of the top folding@home members for awhile was a large compute cluster from their employer. "For burn in" for 6 months.
In this case there is money involved. Of course people are doing this. People will cheat for what amounts to basically internet points.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:15AM
Was the system sitting idle for long periods of time?
How long would they have gotten away with this were it not for this:
Every super computer I've read about is booked solid for years on end. I can see a single purpose machine not connected to the net might run out of work from time to time.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.