Crypto Mining Setup discovered and employee fired.
Interesting thing that happened today:
My sister is a partner in a Property Management Company. This situation unfolded at her company today.
They have a maintenance operations building which houses the Maintenance Management Employees and Equipment. They have been having issues with staff stating the rooms are always too warm.
So, today they had a guy go into check out what was overheating and in a back office they found this setup.
I thought it was kind of funny and wondered how many of you have considered setting up such an operation at work. The employee responsible was terminated for dishonesty, theft of electricity as well as creating a fire hazard in the workspace, which I think was the right decision by the company. I thought it was interesting and entertaining. By the way, the equipment was confiscated, now my Nephew wants to know how to set it up and use it. lol
Ouch! That confiscation will hurt for sure, but will pay the electricity he theft.
I wouldn't do something like this in my job since I'm from Venezuela and mining here is cheap.
What a terrible way of disguising it... he could at least have tried a bit more... he deserves what he got.
Not gonna lie: I totally thought about doing this when I worked at the warehouse! There was a nice little corner that nobody but me ever went to… I thought about setting up a rig there every day! 😂
Haha! Well as the HR people get involved in this, I do not recommend it.
I've never considered doing this at work, or doing this in general... but I know of one of my coworkers set up nicehash on ~300 computers at my university.
He's still not in trouble over it but they have all been terminated.
I can't get into the details, but at one of my previous jobs, which was an extremely large network of offices spanning most of the state, we had an IT guy basically hijack all of the computers to mine crypto for him during down time. I'm sure each one alone wasn't mining much of shit, but considering it was thousands of computers and not costing him anything... yaaaaaa... when IT finally figured it out he was gone quickly and they discovered he had set up backdoors to bypass the security and all sorts of other fun stuff. Not sure what happened to him, but I never heard from him again after they got wise.
lol, sometimes I think people are amazingly smart and dumb at the same time. Interesting. I am way to nervous of a person to attempt anything like that.
Insider threat is often the worse kind which is why job rotation and separation of duties is a good thing.
Would deter those that see it as too much overhead to set everything up to tear everything down and scrub any trace so oncoming doesn't detect it.
What a sad story, poor man he lost all that setup, but he's crazy too, how do you install your own mini-farm at your work without being discovered? Hahahaha
I am sure this happens all over the place, I wouldnt be surprised if in some of the big data centres in companies there are mining setups in place
I bet you are right! :) I hadn't thought of it.
It happens here lol, a major newspaper called Últimas Noticias had a Javascript mining rig for months on their website. They used their readers' processing power for a long time. People talked about it a lot, but they kept it up, not a care in the world. I'm not sure if they have already removed it, but it must be very profitable and it's not illegal, so...
Wait, but wasn't this bought out of the employee's pocket? Lol.
It seems kinda funny right now in these early stages. People do stuff counting on other people's ignorance.
Here in Venezuela, the government has been doing similar things. Whenever they find Bitcoin miners who are not registered in the national cryptocurrency miner registry (now mandatory), they kidnap the miners and sometimes send them to jail, and they "expropriate" the equipment and use it for their own purposes. When they're kidnapped, they usually ask them to kindly transfer the BTC in their wallets to the gvt., I heard.
That is horrendous
Hmm, good question, I will tell my sister to check the books. She had no idea what the whole thing was and sent me the pictures. lol. She thought it was a bitcoin server. hahaha
Nice setup.
They need to be careful on the slippery slope of chargeable offences.
As, "stealing" electricity needs to be clearly defined. Otherwise, it leads to hypocrisy.
We have guys who use the compressor to pump up their recreation vehicles, we have guys who work on their own technology as we have a technical workshop.
We have guys fixing manager's microwaves and such during work time.
We have people use the photocopier for their children's school projects...
But the main component here is, Permission.
As a manager, we allow our staff some flexibility in order to create a good culture. If a line is crossed, then all that "benefit" is removed.
As people put in additional hours for free.
But, when it comes to our head office, there is a lot of hypocrisy. As, to fire someone under certain rules, those rules don't apply to people they like.
It sounds like this employee didn't fit the culture and did not have any "White Knights" to smooth the situation over.
companies often get cheap electricity so they should really be setting these up themselves after hours. Electricity companies could also. Perhaps Elon musk's battery solutions all have crypto miners in them and they are generating via volume of small amounts.