Russian Nuclear Engineers Caught Cryptomining on Lab Supercomputer | Hacker News Reader

Russian Nuclear Engineers Caught Cryptomining on Lab Supercomputer

hpcwire.com

40 pointsrbanffy13 comments

Interesting URL parameters:

utm_campaign=Contact+Quiboat+For+More+Referrer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=quiboat&utm_content=&utm_term=

Maybe someone can strip them from the link?

This story has been submitted a lot: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&query=russia%20m...

If you upvoted this submission and would have liked to have seen it sooner, maybe you should spend more time on the "new" page.

Curious what kind of hash rates you would get on a 'super' computer..

I speculate less than the latest ASIC device.

Probably less Bitcoin hashes per watt/time, but BTC is not the only cryptocurrency they can mine.

It is true but what cryptocurrency you can mine with a supercomputer that gives you a profit?

Any, as long as someone else pays for the operation.

But you can probably do a lot if your computer has lots of GPUs and CPUs on fast interconnects.

I don't understand how they're nuclear engineers and not smart enough deduce someone would notice their supercomputer being connected to the internet.

Could be a group of interns

Can confirm. Work at nuclear research firm, have supercomputer, interns always talking about casually cryptomining on it. It doesn't have too many gpus (we haven't gotten into CUDA driven neutron transport and ray tracing yet) so it'd be a waste.

Risk of getting caught is always there. But the reward is too high sometimes which makes up for it. Imagine, if they could silently mine for a long time - they'll be able to retire in Bangkok.

Agreed, sometimes the reward is just too high to simply "pass on an opportunity".

We had an undergrad utilize our then, nascent CUDA nodes. But, simple monitoring of the nodes raised a red flag.

When we looked into his running jobs, we found an expediently crafted work-flow, where there was no attempt at obfuscation. That is, the user's input files all contained references to various mining sites at that time...

Needless to say, privileges were revoked and never restored!

With a little more thought, this could be done with a less obvious connection to the internet. The just need to transmit the correct hash, which can be done from a different computer. It's just the hash calculation that needs to happen on the supercomputer.

Regardless, the Russians obviously don't pay these scientists enough if they have to resort to crypto-mining to pad their salaries ;)

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