Australian Risks Going To Prison After Using Work Computer For Mining

Australian risks going to prison after he used his supercomputer at work to mine cryptocurrency as we are reading more in today’s crypto news.

A former employee of CSIRO, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, risked going to prison after being caught using a supercomputer at work to mine cryptocurrency. Jonathan Khoo, 34, worked as a contractor at CSIRO.

According to a news report, between January and February 2018, Khoo managed to use two of the supercomputers at his workplace to mine cryptocurrencies. According to the reports, he used the devices for his financial gain and managed to mine crypto worth $6,897 and deposit them into the ETH and Monero wallets. This was discovered in February 2018 when he god dismissed from CSIRO. The next month, the Australian Federal Police looked into the issue and Khoo faced an official charge in 2019. The Australian risks going to prison but his stunt in mining crypto illegally didn’t end the way you think.

The company lost about $76,668 worth of computational power, as the Federal Police cybercrime operations commander Chris Goldsmid said:

 “This man’s activities diverted these supercomputer resources away from performing significant scientific research for the nation, including pulsar data array analysis, medical research and climate modelling work.”

The defendant’s lawyers noted that before he stared mining crypto, Khoo had no offenses in the past and admitted his crime before he police, showing remorse for his actions. Magistrate Erin Kennedy, sentenced Khoo to a 15-month intensive corrections order, making him deliver 300 hours of community service to continue counseling. He won’t be spending time in prison but he will be serving his custodial sentence in the community.

The maximum penalty for the offenses of this kind according to the Australian law is 10 years in prison. According to Goldsmid, “malicious cyber activity, including by people on the inside of organizations, was increasing in scale and severity. Authorities urge companies and all government agencies to keep up a strong culture of cybersecurity in order to strengthen their ability to detect possible breaches.”

As we reported previously, The Australian hacker, a woman under the name Kathryn Nguyen will serve a maximum of 2 years and 3 months in prison for stealing more than 100,000 XRP tokens back in 2018. According to the reports, the Australian publication Information Age, Nguyen was sentenced over the theft of more than $300,000 in XRP in less than two years ago. She was charged in October 2018 and pled guilty to fraud charges in August.