A couple of engineers and employees of the Russian Nuclear Center in Sarov have been caught using the facility’s supercomputers in order to mine Bitcoin. They managed to connect the offline machines to the Intranet and apply its computational power to the Bitcoin network.
Still, the efforts of these engineers did not get far. The RFNC-VNIEEF press service stated that the operation has been ‘timely suppressed’ with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) beginning to investigate the case after picking up the unauthorized data from the device. There is still no information provided regarding the number of Bitcoins that were successfully mined or the identity of the accused.
Obviously, the offenders will face charges for this. According to the institution’s government, this is “state-treason” although no information is still available regarding their punishment. According to some sources, they have been released from detention on the condition that they remain in the country.
According to Tatyana Zalesskaya who is the head of the research institute press service, this was not the first time this is happening in Russia. As she stated, “Similar attempts have recently been registered in a number of large companies with large computing capacities”.
The supercomputer is what’s interesting in this topic. According to reviews, it is capable of one petaflop which is basically the biggest and greatest power – reserved only for the most powerful supercomputers. With proper Bitcoin mining, it could get very profitable and rewarded with many Bitcoins. The amount that the engineers mined on it is still not known.
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