In Russia, arrested employees of a closed nuclear center for mining bitcoins

Two engineers of a closed nuclear center in Sarov (Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia) were arrested for using the power of a working supercomputer to extract bitcoins.

Фото: Depositphotos

The attackers were caught by the security department of the enterprise, after which the case was transferred to the FSB, the issue of bringing charges of treason against them is being considered, the newspaper writes CNews.

Attempt of engineers was not crowned with success - the security service learned about the activities of intruders in a timely manner. Both failed miners are under a subscription on their own recognizance, the company's management is considering the issue of their dismissal.

A supercomputer in Sarov, designed for complex calculations, is generally suitable for performing the calculations that cryptocurrency mining requires. The only obstacle was that the computer was not connected to the Internet. However, the attackers were able to solve this problem by connecting it to the internal network. It was at that moment that the security department learned about their activities, which monitored the connection to the network of new devices.

The city of Sarov is a closed administrative entity. There is located the Russian Federal Nuclear Center - All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics (RFNC-VNIIEF), where the incident occurred.

Own supercomputer started work in this establishment in March 2011. At that time, it was the most powerful supercomputer in Russia - its performance was equal to 1 PFLOPS, which allowed the machine to occupy 12 place in the world rating of supercomputers.

Specialists of the nuclear center carried out the assembly of the supercomputer independently. The supercomputer was built on the basis of x86 microarchitecture processors, graphics accelerators were not used in it. The system used only air cooling. The plans of Rosatom, which includes the nuclear center, were a phased increase in the computing capacity of the machine ten times every three years, with access to the exaflops level of performance in 2020 year.

The use of corporate capacities for mining cryptocurrency is a fairly common practice. In the example, in 2018, the chairman of the board of Sberbank, German Gref сообщилthat the bank often convicts its employees in mining cryptocurrency in the workplace.

In December, FSN officers searched the Vnukovo 2017 after the airport management complained of constant power surges. The result of the test was detention a system administrator who built a farm for mining cryptocurrency at the Moscow Air Traffic Control Center.

At the end of September 2017, it turned out that two employees of the IT department of the office of the Council of Ministers of the Crimea illegally mined bitcoins at the facilities of government networks, installing special mining software there.

In February, 2017 of the year, it became known that an employee of the US Federal Reserve, which has a monopoly on the issue of the dollar, used the working server’s capacity for two years to produce cryptocurrency. To remotely control the process, he modified the server's security system. The guilty was fined $ 5 thousand and placed under supervision for 12 months.

In 2014, the National Science Organization (NSF) of the USA reported that a researcher who collaborated with it produced crypto currency on supercomputers of two American universities, which were sponsored from state funds. The power expended in the mining process cost the state $ 150 thousand. At the same time, the amount received by the intruder was about $ 8-10 thousand.

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