Students & Working Adults Are Mining Cryptocurrency on the Down-Low
Used to be, college students who needed extra money would take on part-time jobs at the mall; working adults would engage in moonlighting (sometimes, working beside the students at the mall).
But that’s so 20th century.
These days, industrious and computer-literate college students and corporate employees looking for a side hustle turn to a far more lucrative source of income than the local mall: cryptocurrency mining, the process of “creating” new digital currencies such as Bitcoin.
How Cryptocurrency Mining Works
To “mine” new cryptocurrencies, miners solve highly complex math problems with cryptographic hash functions, which allows them to add blocks to the blockchain. When successful, they are rewarded with small amounts of cryptocurrency of their very own.
Sounds easy, right? It’s not. To prevent devaluation of the digital currencies, the math problems are too complex to be solved by hand, or even with a calculator. Miners must use specialized computing equipment — and enormous amounts of both processing power and electricity.
Some miners who don’t want to spend the money on the equipment or the electricity turn to cryptocurrency mining malware such as WannaMine. Others, like a Penn State graduate recently interviewed by CNBC, invest in the equipment but stick their employer or their university with the eye-popping electricity bills. Patrick Cines told CNBC he mined crypto out of his dorm room. When he began, the intense heat his machine generated took him by surprise:
“It was unbearable… I had fans running, I had the window open,” Cines said, describing what it was like when we first plugged his homemade miner in. “The first day I was living there, went to Home Depot, bought some dryer tubes, strapped them to the front, and used that to push all the hot air outside of my room.”
CNBC goes on to report that “[cybersecurity firm] Vectra did a study of mining on 11 college campuses and found instances on mining at every school. In fact, the universities were seeing students set up mining operations between one to four times every day.”
No one knows how much dorm-room mining operations are pushing up higher education institutions’ power bills, but we do know that cryptocurrency mining operations suck up so much electricity, some U.S. counties are restricting crypto miners, citing their insatiable demands for power, and some utilities are considering charging them higher rates.
Enterprise Networks Also at Risk — From Their Own Employees
Technically inclined college students aren’t the only ones latching onto someone else’s resources to cash in on the crypto gold rush. In addition to external threats like WannaMine and other cryptojacking malware, employers have to guard against employees using enterprise equipment and utilities to mine crypto on the down-low:
- In October 2016, a communications analyst at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve accepted a plea bargain for using the Fed’s servers to run a Bitcoin mining operation for over two years. He had “installed bitcoin mining software on at least one server [at the Fed], and created a backdoor to it so that he could remotely access the mining software from home.”
- In March 2018, an employee at Florida’s Department of Citrus (FDoC) was arrested on charges of allegedly using state-owned computers to mine Bitcoin and Litecoin. It was alleged that he had used $22,000 worth of state money to purchase 24 graphic processing units and had caused the department’s utility bills to rise by over 40%.
- Also in March, the Louisiana Attorney General opened an investigation into its own IT department for allegedly using state resources to mine Bitcoin.
Stratospheric electricity bills and system slowness aren’t the only adverse side effects of rouge crypto mining operations; they could also expose university and enterprise networks to malware.
Originally published at wildowldigital.com on August 14, 2018.
