The Australian Federal Police have charged a Sydney man for the alleged offence of using Government assets for his own Crypto mining venture. This follows an unrelated incident where two members of the IT department at the Bureau of Meteorology were questioned by police over the alleged use of the agency’s IT infrastructure to mine cryptocurrency.

Needless to say.. this is a ‘No-No’!

The 33 year old man was employed as a Government contractor and is to face Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court on the charge of unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment and unauthorised modification of restricted data.

The charges were files following the search of the man’s Killara residence on Sydney’s North Shore in March in which the Police were able to seize a laptop, mobile phone and other items presumably related to the man’s employment and subsequent offences.

The AFP have alleged that the man  “abused his position as an IT contractor to manipulate program to use the processing power of the agency’s computer network for cryptocurrency mining”.

For his efforts, it’s estimated that the man profited approximately $9,000.

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What is Crypto Mining?

Cryptocurrency mining, or cryptomining, is a process in which transactions for various forms of cryptocurrency are verified and added to the blockchain digital ledger. Also known as cryptocoin mining, altcoin mining, or Bitcoin mining (for the most popular form of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin), cryptocurrency mining has increased both as a topic and activity as cryptocurrency usage itself has grown exponentially in the last few years.