Australian Government Employee Charged For Using Government Computers to Mine Cryptocurrency

A 33-year-old Australian Government employee was charged for abusing computer systems at his workplace to mine cryptocurrency for personal gain.

According to the AFP report, he earned more than $9000 in the illegal mining operation, before AFP officers seized his laptop, personal phone, employee ID cards, and data files.

It’s unclear on how he injected the mining scripts in the target machine and how he eventually caught.

He appeared in Sydney Local Court on 21 May 2019, and he was charged for Unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment and Unauthorised modification of restricted data.

“Australian taxpayers put their trust in public officials to perform vital roles for our community with the utmost integrity. Any alleged criminal conduct which betrays this trust for personal gain will be investigated and prosecuted,” says acting Commander Chris Goldsmid.

He is to carry maximum penalties of 10 years and two years imprisonment, respectively.

It is not the first time that employees using computer systems at work to mine cryptocurrency. In another case, a Chinese high school headmaster fired for deploying Ethereum mining machine in school for more than a year. He deployed, Eight mining machine’s in school, which increases the school electricity bill.

In another incident, police arrested 16 person hacker group for illegally mining cryptocurrency at Internet cafes. The hacker group compromised thousands of system in more than 30 cities across the country and earned more than 5 million yuan worth ($800,000).

Cryptomining attacks are increasing rapidly; attackers use to compromise servers, personal computers, Chrome extensions, and web portals to mine cryptocurrencies such as Monero.

Mining cryptocurrencies in a legitimate way are quite resource consuming process, so in some cases, users try to infect other computers to mine the cryptocurrencies.

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