BoM staff questioned over crypto mining

Two employees from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) have reportedly been implicated in a police investigation into the use of the bureau's supercomputers to mine cryptocurrencies.

AFP officers searched the bureau’s Collins Street headquarters last Wednesday and interrogated two IT employees, an unnamed source told the ABC.

While no charges have yet been laid, the investigation is ongoing and one of the employees questioned has gone on leave, according to the report.

The unauthorised use of the bureau’s computers to mine for cryptocurrency could be an illegal use of government resources.

Neither the bureau nor the AFP would comment publicly on the investigation, except for the AFP confirming that it executed a search warrant at a business premises in Docklands, the location of the BoM headquarters.

While the method and extent of the incident are unclear, the alleged perpetrators may have been seeking to use the bureau’s vast supercomputing resources to mine for coins — an activity that requires an increasingly significant amount of computing power.

The BoM commissioned a Cray XC-40 supercomputer in late 2016 that houses 2160 compute nodes, with 51,840 Intel Xeon cores.

But another possibility is that the alleged perpetrators may have simply wanted to avoid the electricity costs associated with cryptocurrency mining.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/ra2 studio

Follow us and share on Twitter and Facebook