Former Fed Employee Fined $5,000 For Installing Bitcoin Software On Server (bloomberg.com) 80
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A former Federal Reserve employee was sentenced Friday to 12 months probation and a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty in October to installing unauthorized software on a computer server at the U.S. central bank. Nicholas Berthaume, who as a communications analyst had access to computer servers at the Fed's Board of Governors in Washington, installed software that connected to an online bitcoin network in order to earn units of the digital currency, according to a statement Monday from the central bank's Office of Inspector General. Berthaume also "modified certain security safeguards so that he could remotely access the server from home," the statement said. When confronted, he tried to cover up his actions by deleting the software; eventually he was fired and admitted guilt, the office said. His actions didn't result in the loss of any Fed information, and the board has enhanced security since the incident, the internal watchdog said. The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled).
Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother? It is not like those servers can compete with ASIC mining anyway...
Curiosity: can I make it work and can I get away with it.
Value: it's free electricity.
Rick/reward fail: Failure to see the consequences of being caught will outweigh the likely reward.
It is quite surprising this hasn't happened more often, unless there's an interest in keeping the discovery and dismissal in house.
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Nearly 280 million views... I wonder how many of those were intentional.
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At this point, what would be the average time for a GPU or even a CPU to mine a bitcoin?
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Oh, so I have a good chance of making a profit then?
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Not if you start it, than it is a straight up ponzi scheme. Late comers greed, creates the false sense of credibility about your imaginary pile of loot. Real problem in getting rid of your hoard a billion of dollars of fake currency is a real tough sell (kind of really, really, collapses the value of your imaginary currency). Take the US dollar, is keeps the entire US defence force to back the illusion of the made up money and the US Fed, don't want to play and they will pretty much kill you (on a country l
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Here's one from as far back as 2011:
https://thenextweb.com/au/2011... [thenextweb.com]
It's probably not making the news so much because it's probably normally thought of as a petty crime.
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Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's only if you're trying to make a profit out of mining and you have expenses like real estate, electricity, the mining hardware, etc.
If you didn't have all that overhead, CPU based mining is more than adequate, especially if you have free real estate, free electricity and free hardware. Sure you'll mine slowly, but it's all profit.
Some ransomware does this, as do many malware - when you have a botnet of 500,000 for free use, bitcoin mining isn't terribly bad, especially since it's all free to you.
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Meanwhile the NSA has ordered up another ~50 million or so GPU cores for their latest encryption / decryption servers...I'm not saying that they could run the BitCoin exchange if they wanted to, but they totally could.
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See also Bitcoin miner trojans.
You may not create money (Score:5, Funny)
You may not create money! What do you think this is the federal reserve bank or something?
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Score: 1677215, Funny.
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Shitty secutity at it's finnest!
He got caught.
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Admin rights to a server?
You don't need admin privileges to mine bitcoins. A normal user login is enough.
Tru firewall and proxy? Seriously?
Even a web browser can do that. Where I work, this many people are unable to access outside servers: 0.
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He was a Communications Analyst, so I'm not at all surprised that he had access to the servers. But, again, while the eeeevil hacker getting access to your computer(s) is the thing that makes the news, most problems occur because of some employee, disgruntled or not, pulls something like this simply because they can.
Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of that guy who got sacked a while back for loading SETI at Home on a bunch of servers at his work.
Is it really that hard to remember that the computers at your employer's company are not yours?
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Well, at least he didn't do something really dire and criminal like tweet about climate change.
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didn't do something really dire and criminal like tweet about climate change
You mean, make official communications on behalf of a federal agency when the person in charge of that agency is in the middle of replacing - as happens regularly - the politically appointed management of that agency? Yeah, like that.
I suppose, though, you'd have been cool with an employee of NASA making tweets from official government accounts about Putin's secret moon base where he produces pieces for his mind control ray machine. Right? No? I see. Communicating from official channels on behalf of the
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Actually they belong to Europa. Don't touch them and don't land there.
Lovely! (Score:2)
Sad But True (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is a difference between running a mud and running a bitcoin miner eating 100% CPU/GPU all the time. There is also the hardware advancement computers have made in the past decades, CPUs and GPUs now all enter a powersaving mode when they aren't used to their full potential. The employee was practically converting additional dollars on his employers electricity bill into bitcoins in a very lossy fashion.
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Stupid and unprofitable (Score:3)
I looked into it out of curiosity about a year ago and concluded that I could make somewhere around $5 - $15 a month, while spending more on power. It long stopped being worth mining with common hardware.
Of course using someone else's equipment you don't have that downside, but those consequences far outweigh whatever pocket cash he made from it, unless it was installed on an entire cluster.
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yep bitcoing mining long ceased to be viable on regular PC hardware. Anyone doing profitable mining is using dedicated ASIC-based hardware.
Bitcoin miners are basically an arms race; Uness you're developing your own ASICs and keeping it private, its not even worth buying ASIC-based hardware anymore because by the time you get it, the "difficulty factor" (steadily increasing artificial factor designed to limit the amount of bitcoins produced) has been raised so much by other people mining with similar hardwar
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What you said used to be true because the difficulty was ramping up every few weeks/months, but today it's much slower. The next jump is supposed to be around 2020. http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.co... [bitcoinblockhalf.com]
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The halving of block rewards (always every four years) has no relation to changes of difficulty (changes depending on total hashrate to keep block intervals regular).
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Ah, I see. I thought the difficulty changed at the same time as the halving.
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Bitcoin, the currency of criminality
Na, that is USD.
Sure, some people use bitcoin in their "criminal empire" but that is a mere pittance compared to normal fiat cash.
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Are you kidding? I could be independently wealthy now had I bought bitcoins back when they were worth pennies. I'd buy Amazon gift cards with bitcoins and then sell the cards for cash.
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Hillary new the first rule: _Never admit to nothin._
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I suspect H actually didn't know. Most of, perhaps all, of the "problem emails" were sent TO her by others. She wouldn't just automatically know; should she keep asking for all 40,000 sent? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? 40,000 fricken times.
It shouldn't be her job to vet them anyhow, a low-level grunt could vet them for say 1/5 the cost. As far as the "(c)" markings, those are commonly used for many different things.
Example:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca... [ca.gov].
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Wrong.
I don't know why they are not, other than the "intention" bottleneck would keep coming up over and over. They were the originators of putting most the wrong info on the unclassified systems (regular generic office email) to begin with.
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I don't think somebody should outright be fired for something like this. Fined and suspended for a few months is sufficient. People make mistakes and deserve a second chance, barring something extreme. Those punished are usually more careful than average anyhow. They are probably less likely to make more such mistakes than their replacement.
If he/she does something stupid a second time, THEN boot 'em.
This has to be going on at a crazy level (Score:1)
in small businesses and even medium sized enterprises where a small number of admins are gods (no regular outside audits) or security is weak to non-existent. I wouldn't be shocked if billion in electricity was being siphoned off like this illegally annually.
Buzz off with your pseudo-money (Score:2)
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Those "bullshit bitsy shekels" have a market cap over USD$15B
Enron ~2001... Real assets valued around USD$63B.
So I'd have to say that yeah, a whole hell of a lot of people would seriously buy those bullshit bitsy shekels.
Well, as that old saying goes... ;-)
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Sure. I've bought some bitcoin. Nothing more than I can afford to lose, however. $20 worth every year or two. I send fractions to folks on the internet, couple bucks at a time. I find it worth $20 every year to know that I can send random people around the world $1-$5 on a whim. I occasionally Reddit, and they've got ChangeTipBot and DodgeBot, where you can automagically send a couple bucks to someone. I've tossed out a few "bullshit bitsy shekels" for great posts and useful information.
I'm well aw
Breaking Even??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Today's current exchange rate is 5.41 coins for $5000.00.
The article doesn't say how long he had the system running. But if it had any serious processing power, and he got 1 coin per month for six months? That's breaking even.
If he managed to do it longer than six months, then that's a profit, especially since he didn't tie up too much time in court trying to plead not guilty.
I would say, "Not bad!", but we don't know how long he was running the software. And he's not likely to say, either.
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Of course, under Trump there may be an alternative truth I haven't been made aware of, but until it's confirmed on Twitter or breitbart.com I'm going to assume what I was taught in school still holds.
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Profit = (Gross Income - Expenses) / Gross Income.
Expenses =0 means 100% profit.
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If you take a longer view on the "profit" made. What's the difference in pay between a Network Communications Analyst at the Federal Reserve and a fry cook at the local hole in the wall cafe?
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And if he has been mining since may 2010 or so, a $5000 fine is nothing. Heck, even a 5 million fine would be a joke to him.
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No data lost - the report claims (Score:2)
Let's try that again shall we?
1) They haven't found any evidence of data being lost
2) They lost a lot of data but prefer not to admit it....
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!
Now the question is: (Score:2)
Eventually fired?! (Score:1)
Was the employee first fined, then put on probation, then eventually fired?!
Is the employee fired after the 12 months probation?!
Did the (sentencing) entity change their minds on this?