SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday February 11 2018, @09:20AM
The thought has probably crossed a few peoples mind, including my own. I used to manage a lab for a university with a fair amount of computers standing around. Not supercomputers but normal computers, we could have clustered them if we wanted to. Most of the day the computers did nothing but just stand there, students came and used them during the day for their needs but it was mostly just word-processing, surfing, emails, running various software for statistics etc. The computers never really got shutdown so they stood there all night long doing nothing, mostly so they could get patched and updated during the night. The idea was toyed with among administrators that we would, should or could use all the computers (several thousands of them) the university had between 2200 and 0600 at full speed and running in the background at low speed during the other hours of the day. Turns out that power consumption would have gone thru the roof so someone would have noticed, heat production would have forced heating fans (not only in the computers but in the building) to work at full capacity all night to so more electricity consumed, not to mention since the students did have access 24-7 someone would have noticed and cried about it eventually -- even thou the facilities department and the accountants would have found out way before that. It just wasn't really feasible. Also bitcoins wasn't worth much back then so to much of it would have gone into bribes for other staff to hide the fact that we would have been misappropriating university equipment. But it was fun as an idea if nothing else.
So if it crossed mine and the coworkers mind then the same thought has probably crossed the mind of everybody that is in a similar situation. It might not have been worth it financially at the time, but if we had just waited about 15 years or so those bitcoins would have been totally sweeeeet.