A director at a South Korean government-affiliated food research institute found himself in hot water after being charged with theft and breach of trust for mining crypto right at his workplace.
Crypto mining at work, not the best idea
The director is said to have misused the institute’s budget to buy extra mining equipment, including air conditioning units and separate electrical facilities.
He reportedly got the mining operation up and running in April 2022 and kept it going until it was uncovered in September 2023.
To dodge the institute’s firewall, which blocks access to crypto mining and wallet sites, the director used a VPN.
And if this is not enough, he also impersonated a colleague to purchase another dedicated mining GPU, adding to his list of pretty questionable actions.
Financial damage
The National Research Council of Science and Technology, the NST’s audit committee estimates that the director caused around 7.86 million won, around 6,000 USD in damages.
They recommended that the institute recover these losses and let the employee go, fire him.
The auditors also discovered that he falsely registered attendance records and forged private documents.
Security measures against crypto mining
The NST concluded that the institute, or maybe all institutes in the country needs to take a closer look at its network operations and upgrade security measures to prevent similar incidents in the future.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in South Korea, as back in 2021, investigators found a government employee mining Ethereum beneath Seoul’s most famous opera house.
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