- A Polish IT contractor has been fired after using police computers to mine cryptocurrency
- The contractor upgraded the computers at the Polish National Police headquarters and mined crypto from them
- In terms of sheer brazenness, this has to go down as the biggest illegal crypto mining effort to date
History has thrown up some outlandish locations where opportunists have conducted illegal crypto mining, including a nuclear power station in the Ukraine, but surely none has been as brazen as one attempted in Poland recently. An unnamed IT contractor and an employee at the Polish National Police have been caught illegally mining cryptocurrency in the organisations’ headquarters in the country’s capital of Warsaw, using the facility’s electricity to run the operation. The effort, which gets a 10/10 for sheer gumption but 0/10 for intelligence, was reported by two local media outlets and saw the pair swiftly fired and the case handed to the Prosecutor’s Office.
Perpetrator Upgraded Police Computers for Crypto Mining
News of the audacious crypto mining feat broke over the weekend when Polish news outlet tvn24.pl revealed that the outside contractor had upgraded the computers in the headquarters with high powered GPUs and used the souped-up machines to mine cryptocurrency.
The role of the employee has not yet been revealed, but it is assumed that he helped the contractor gain access to certain parts of the network or the building in order to carry out his mission for a cut of the proceeds.
Police Feared Network Breach
The case against the pair is twofold – firstly there is the theft of electricity, but of more concern to the police is the possibility of internal information being accessible via the outside networks used for the crypto mining pursuits. However, officials from the Polish National Police have insisted that their networks had not been compromised and no breaches of internal information had been detected.
While the scale of this illegal crypto mining operation is certainly smaller than some, the act of committing a crime right under the noses of the national police force in their own headquarters puts it in a class of its own.
