Secret multimillion-dollar cryptojacker snared by Ukrainian police

The criminal thought to be behind a multimillion-dollar cryptojacking scheme is in custody following a Europol-led investigation. Supported by the National Police of Ukraine, Europol arrested a 29-year-old, whose identity is being withheld, this week in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. An unnamed cloud provider worked with Europol et al to …

[Eclectic Man]

What a waste!

It seems to me that the damage done to the environment by burning all that electricity for such a measly reward is almost as bad as the hijacking itself. I hope there are penalties for the waste of resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What a waste!

Given that there are restrictions on how strategic mineral resources can be used (nothing frivolous), I'm amazed we haven't seen the same restrictions on electricity and computer hardware. If whatever a processor is doing isn't productive, it's stealing those resources from something that might be useful to humanity in the future.

[Eclectic Man]

Re: What a waste!

Interesting point. At the risk of being controversial, I wonder what uses more processing power, bitcoin mining or cat videos, and which is 'more useful' to humanity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What a waste!

Bitcoin actively harms humanity by allowing people to disobey the law. Cat videos are probably positive in moderation but, if it were found that they were harming humanity then why not have a council of high minded individuals who declare that that processing power be used to, for example, cure cancer?

[Jedit]

"I wonder what uses more processing power, bitcoin mining or cat videos"

Last I heard, crypto mining and blockchain used as much energy as the entire country of Argentina. And that number will only continue to increase as each blockchain operation must use more energy than the one before it. So I'm guessing that cat videos are more beneficial.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What a waste!

if we were really strict about profit, loss and balance sheet, etc., we should have terminated ourselves by now. From the orbit, to be sure.

[Pascal Monett]

"siphoning their high-powered computational resources"

Ah yes, that wonderful cloud environment where someone else can use your resources and you are not alerted to the fact until you get the bill.

It's marvellous to see that cloud can bill you, but can't guarantee who actually used the resources.

[An_Old_Dog]

(Not) Choosing their Cryptojacking Victims

You'd think the cryptojackers would hide by carefully choosing their victims. The CPU/power suck of cryptomining would probably not be noticed if they'd jacked systems running generative antagonistic networks/machine learning systems. "CPU load is 98%, Boss -- as usual."