Obsessed with mining! Ukrainian nuclear power plant operator secretly mined and was arrested

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) has arrested a power plant operator for mining cryptocurrency at the Yuzhno-Klansk nuclear power plant facility.

Ukrainian English-language news website UNIAN reported the details of the arrests on August 21. According to reports, the cryptocurrency miners compromised the nuclear facility’s security through the internet connection of their mining rigs and ultimately leaked confidential information about the plant’s physical protection system.

SBU agents obtained a search warrant and launched an investigation on July 10. They found unauthorized computer equipment and seized a media converter, fiber optic cables, and some network cables. On the same day, a branch of the National Guard of Ukraine found more cryptocurrency mining equipment at the same nuclear power plant. During this search and seizure, 16 GPU graphics cards, 7 hard drives, 2 solid-state drives, and routers were found.

Nuclear Engineers Try to Mine Bitcoin with a Supercomputer

As previously reported, in February 2018, several engineers from the Russian Federal Nuclear Center were arrested for attempting to mine Bitcoin (BTC) using one of the country’s largest supercomputers.

The computer, which is reportedly capable of performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second, has been disconnected from the internet for security reasons. Tatiana Zalesskaya, head of the institute’s press service, said at the time:

“The unauthorized attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes, including so-called mining, is a technically hopeless act that should be subject to criminal penalties.”

Nuclear energy and blockchain

Last October, Russian state atomic energy corporation Rosatom announced that they would develop blockchain technology for the energy sector, along with the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Evgeniy Abakumov, head of Rosatom’s IT department, said:

“We are committed to integrating 4.0 technologies on a larger scale. IoT, AI, blockchain, etc. are all aimed at improving the efficiency of the manufacturing process.”

At the time of writing, Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom is reportedly recruiting new talent to develop energy technologies in these three areas.