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A gentleman in the southeast orange-growing state was caught and accused of mining cryptocurrency at work, according to the Tampa Bay Times:
TAMPA — A Department of Citrus employee was arrested after he used state computers to produce virtual currency for himself, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Matthew McDermott, 51, of Davenport was the information technology manager for the Florida Department of Citrus, the agency that oversees the state's citrus industry... [H]e used several computers in the Department of Citrus to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin.
He wasn't just mining--he was allegedly really, really into it, to the tune of tens of thousands of Department of Citrus dollars:
Utility bills for the department jumped by more than 40 percent between October 2017 and January 2017, at a cost of about $825... McDermott also spent more than $22,000 using a state purchasing card between July and December, [buying] 24 graphic processing units, the FDLE said.
"Grand Theft" and "Official Misconduct" were his charges upon arrest. With bail set at just $5,000 (less than 1 BTC), he probably made bail pretty quickly.
It seems that mining cryptocurrency is the new en vogue temptation scandal.
Also at The Week, whose story mentions the previous incident at Russian nuclear facilities.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:44AM (3 children)
As long as they're not charging $22K for additional FAH equipment...
The $825 increase in electric bill might have been overlooked without the capital purchase (however, without the capital purchase, I imagine the increase in electric bill would have been much smaller....)
"Old school" office PCs used somewhere in the neighborhood of 100W (+/- 30%), so with Florida electric power rates around $0.11/kWh, that's around $100 per year per PC for 24x7x365 on-time. Your average tech-nerd might have a half-dozen machines on their desk humming away, so that's hardly worth making a fuss over.
However, employees who break out the company card to purchase $22K worth of new and un-needed gear for the purpose of personal monetary gain - that's gotta get nipped in the bud, frozen back before it spreads, quarantined and burned out like canker.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:58PM
$100 per PC per year for a normal work desktop. You need to up that number quite a bit when you put a modern, high wattage GPU card in that machine and run it full blast 24/7/365.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:47PM (1 child)
This article reminds me that I need to run a report of all of my procurement cards and look for this kind of thing... I am going to do some victim blaming here though about the lack of good internal controls. We cap pcard transactions at 5k (asset threshold) and everything less than that must go through the requisition process. There are easy ways to monitor this kind of thing year round that should be in place, hopefully florida learns from this and implements protections.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:51PM
State, Department of Citrus... unlikely. More likely for some politicians to yell at the higher level managers to keep a closer eye, and then continue with business as usual.
🌻🌻 [google.com]