ABC (Australia) employee caught mining for Bitcoins on company servers | Hacker News Reader

ABC (Australia) employee caught mining for Bitcoins on company servers

thenextweb.com

29 pointsAuguste27 comments

Not a very smart thing to do. The employee must have known he was basically stealing resources, and yet the harvest from a few servers doing CPU mining would be miniscule, probably costing more in electricity than could be recovered by trading the proceeds. A $50 graphics card could have likely done a lot better, and no risk involved. Baffling behaviour.

ABC Australia produces content for the several TV stations they run, so it's not impossible he was using a GPU render farm which would have produced a very attractive return.

Do GPU render farms use CUDA or open cl based cards? Do you have a link to the kind of setup you're imagining

Both can be used. CUDA is not that different from OpenCL.

Your underlying question seems to be "is it best to use ATI or NVidia cards for a render farm", I don't know the answer to that. Probably depends on the specific rendering software used.

My point is more does a render farm necessarily need to be one of those options? Actually I thought render farms were exclusively used by large 3d only productions rather than simple broadcasting networks that mostly deal in normal video? What kind of GPU based operations would such an organisation benefit from that they would need an in house permanent render farm?

Hm I guess for high-resolution image/video manipulation, compositing videos, rendering intermediate 3d animations/effects, and such. But you're right they won't need more than a small render "farm". They don't need to render Pixar movies...

I'd be interested to know for sure if the guy was actually running GPU or CPU based miners, but I suspect he probably was just running a CPU miner on everything he could get his hands on and hoping the return on the inefficient approach could be overcome by volume. Likely now he'll lose his source of income and get a lesson on risk v reward.

C'est la vie.

If you don't have to pay for the power or the equipment, it's infinitely efficient!

Losing your job is paying for it, just not the way you'd hoped. :)

Had to happen one day. Is it a good idea for companies to try to use their abundant spare CPU capacity for mining? If there is an intelligent client that does not impact the existing operations of a server but can run on lower priority then what is the harm in making some extra money on the side to cover the cost of operations. The client can be intelligent enough to understand if it makes sense to actually do the mining based on its estimate of how much effort is needed to get some good returns. In case too much processing is required which it does not have or is bigger than a certain threshold it can wait for the conditions to become more favorable.

CPU mining really isn't enough to even break even on the costs involved. You really need a decent ATI GPU in order to get anywhere, which most servers don't have.

Keep in mind that an idle processor draws less power and therefore costs less to run. Unless your electricity is very cheap or free, I don't see how it would work.

This story got me thinking; what stops hackers from using huge botnets to mine bitcoins? Surely more profitable than sending out spam?

I don't know... You make about 0.1 cents per hour mining with a in the wild CPU, that's a lot of emails that could be sent out. Even if spam has a conversion rate of 1 in 10 million it is probably more worth it.

They aren't alternatives: spam is network IO bound, mining is CPU bound. The smart bot herder would do both.

The main danger is that the target notices that their machine is using 100% CPU and removes the bot. It is easier to notice CPU load (heat, fan noise, prominent position in Task Manager) than network load.

the article doesn't mention if he did this for personal gain, but certainly goes out of it's way to call bitcoin a racket that's associated with drugdealing. an IT employee running a program on a server doesn't seem like misconduct to me!

Really? Using company resources for personal gain? Surely would sound like misconduct to any HR board in the world.

its of course a reasonable assumption to infer it was for personal gain, but it's not mentioned in the article, and the gossip column it sourced the info from is registration only.

It's still personal use of ABC resources. It's a publicly funded broadcaster, I'm paying for it. I'm happy with this nong being sacked.

What the article doesn't clarify is that the miner could have been running on the company's website as a JavaScript client, mining with website visitor's CPU cycles for personal gain.

Uh, that would IMO make it worse.

ke ke ke nong. I'm going to make a committment to use this word once a day for the next month.

Everybody uses company resources for personal gain. If we got no gain from working: we wouldn't work. The only difference is that this gain creates a zero-sum game in which the company is at a loss.

Well, anyone who looks at Facebook or reads their email at work is technically misusing company resources. But when smokers take a 15 minute break every hour, I think a company who fired you for poking someone would find itself staring down the wrong end of a tribunal.

I think that comes down to expectations. If an employer decides that Facebook is a distraction, communicates with staff that the site will be blocked, AND an employee hacks around the block in order to access the site - that could be a dismissal offence (more likely a warning, but if it's part of repeated behaviour...). Compare that to the (albeit, sadly, probably more likely) scenario that you are probably referring to - a boss deciding he wants to sack someone and using Facebook use, which the business has never actually defined one way or the other, as a reason - and yes, that's a silly business move.

Everybody uses company resources for personal gain.

Everybody uses company resources for the company gains. Only. In the end of the month, the company pays you something called 'salary'. You use the salary as you want. That's your gain. And your only gain. (Okay, may be bonuses, equity...)

That's what I know (and learned) so far.

Change your tone: I'm sure we all understand the concept of 'salary'. :)

I don't think that's our only gain from working at a company. Working at a company (1) gives you experience working on projects that you might not be able to get without the required trust in your personal brand, (2) socialises you with technical people from your discipline, and (3) increases your job security.

I particularly consider (2) very important. Of course, you can quit your job and create as startup, but: you're creating risk for yourself and there are things which companies provide employees which have to be built over time.

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