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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:18:55 PM EDT
[#1]
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:20:44 PM EDT
[#2]
I could see it happening. Make a bit of code to run in the off hours, and it's not likely anyone would notice I would imagine.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:22:48 PM EDT
[#3]
I could do it with about an hour of work, over a thousand computers
Bitcoin mining isn’t worth it anymore tho 200 computers? Lol |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:23:15 PM EDT
[#4]
Wasthatwrong.gif
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:23:46 PM EDT
[#5]
As someone else pointed out doing this (now) on 200 computers is stupid & pointless.
I do recall a local employee at a school district around here running SETI@home on all the PCs in the district. Guy basically cost the district millions with the PCs running 24/7/365 at 100% when you talk about hardware lifespan, HVAC, electricity, etc. For fucking aliens... |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:23:47 PM EDT
[#6]
When I worked at Gateway 2000 in the 1990s, the VP of tech support was a huge alien guy. Ted Waite, the owner, and him had SETI installed on everyone's computer that worked in tech support.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:23:54 PM EDT
[#7]
 Office Space - Printer Scene (UNCENSORED) |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:25:07 PM EDT
[#8]
Quote HistoryQuoted: As someone else pointed out doing this (now) on 200 computers is stupid & pointless. I do recall a local employee at a school district around here running SETI@home on all the PCs in the district. Guy basically cost the district millions with the PCs running 24/7/365 at 100% when you talk about hardware lifespan, HVAC, electricity, etc. For fucking aliens... When I was at UNCC all the computers in every engineering lab ran SETI.... |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:27:16 PM EDT
[#9]
At a previous job the IT guys were using a bunch of old servers to mine, I think they had at least a dozen going. They were old obsolete servers that weren't in use, so probably slower than what the modern servers we had at the time would have been.
I think they blew all the money buying lunch on Fridays 
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:28:04 PM EDT
[#10]
I am surprised its not done more. As was said make all the computers run it off hours, net work traffic should stay the same low level but the individual computers running 100% all night.
The next thing that has surprised me is that some one has not written a worm to go in to peoples computers at their houses and mine at night. Dont do any damage to the computer that antivirus would pick up, basically just start mining after the screen saver is on for say 30 mins or an hour, and have it keep the screen off unless the keyboard or mouse turns it on then suspend the mining. edit, doing this you could have 10,000 or more computers doing the work |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:29:23 PM EDT
[#11]
Quote HistoryQuoted: I could do it with about an hour of work, over a thousand computers Bitcoin mining isn’t worth it anymore tho 200 computers? Lol Probably using a miner on a pool that pays out in Bitcoin, or just the article's author said Bitcoin instead of some crypto no one heard about (or ignant). You ain't gonna get rich, but you can make money again with the value of cryptos now. It's VERY profitable if you haven't paid for the equipment and aren't paying for the electricity.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:29:47 PM EDT
[#12]
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:30:29 PM EDT
[#13]
CPU mining went out a while ago.
Now the only miners that can make any ground are specialized ASICs and clusters of GPUs, and even then you need an industrial scale to make any real money. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:30:50 PM EDT
[#14]
Quote HistoryQuoted: When I was at UNCC all the computers in every engineering lab ran SETI.... It's pretty common. 15 years ago I recall another university doing the same thing. I think the majority of the time either management doesn't know or management doesn't care because they're not aware of the externalities. I can recall one job where I shut someone doing that shit down when I walked into a computer lab on the weekend and found it was like 140 degrees inside. Nobody knew that the IT guy decided to install Einstein@Home on the PCs. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:32:00 PM EDT
[#15]
with computers? no you need machine made just to mine these days
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:32:11 PM EDT
[#16]
Quote HistoryQuoted: I am surprised its not done more. As was said make all the computers run it off hours, net work traffic should stay the same low level but the individual computers running 100% all night. The next thing that has surprised me is that some one has not written a worm to go in to peoples computers at their houses and mine at night. Dont do any damage to the computer that antivirus would pick up, basically just start mining after the screen saver is on for say 30 mins or an hour, and have it keep the screen off unless the keyboard or mouse turns it on then suspend the mining. edit, doing this you could have 10,000 or more computers doing the work JavaScript crypto miners were a fairly big thing just a little while ago. While you were on a webpage they took the opportunity to use the limited capabilities of your web browser to mine. Individually useless but if you have thousands upon thousands of people on a website... it can add up. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:34:05 PM EDT
[#17]
Quote HistoryQuoted: As someone else pointed out doing this (now) on 200 computers is stupid & pointless. I do recall a local employee at a school district around here running SETI@home on all the PCs in the district. Guy basically cost the district millions with the PCs running 24/7/365 at 100% when you talk about hardware lifespan, HVAC, electricity, etc. For fucking aliens... Is that the only thing they could detect?  When I see a big spend I always suspect military/defense use. Can the SETI sensors be used to detect/track/analyze satellites? 
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:36:27 PM EDT
[#18]
Quoted: That’s not an actual headline and I know nothing about Bitcoin, but I’m surprised we haven’t seen an occurrence of this yet. Theoretically, could an IT admin in some small sector business with complete control and trust over their fleet of PC’s use them to mine Bitcoin without them knowing? I can just hear secretary Sally afterward, “well my computer always ran a little slow but I didn’t think anything of it, and Jimmy the IT kid seemed really nice.” "Cryptojacking" is well known thing in the cybersecurity field. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:36:31 PM EDT
[#19]
Just wait until someone infects billions of I[di]OT devices with some cryptomining maleware.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:38:57 PM EDT
[#20]
LOL
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:40:58 PM EDT
[#21]
Quote HistoryQuoted: I could do it with about an hour of work, over a thousand computers Bitcoin mining isn’t worth it anymore tho 200 computers? Lol I've heard this, but I've also heard that video cards are completely sold out again because of cryptomining. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:41:23 PM EDT
[#22]
Had it happen at our work a couple years ago. A locked room in the old sales building with internet connection. It was then moved to a small cleanroom in the main building that wasn't being used. Someone found it and Po-lice and eff bee eye came to investigate. Not sure where it ended up.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:41:51 PM EDT
[#23]
About 10 years ago, I was doing an acquisition and the IT guys at the acquired company was using company servers to mine bitcoins. I thought nothing of it at the time, but in retrospect I should have asked for a cut of the mining operations. The company was in Century City, and I use to stay at a Marriott about a couple of blocks down from the Nakatomi Towers.
Come Out To The Coast, We'll Get Together, Have A Few Laughs.. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:44:23 PM EDT
[#24]
Way, way back in the day, I may or may not know someone who used a few empty computer labs at college to mine bitcoin, some of them stayed on for days... allegedly... And of course liquidated the BTC right after mining...
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:48:56 PM EDT
[#25]
It would be easier for the IT guy to guy a empty server cabinet, and fill it full of 8GPU mining rigs, then just install it in the server room. If he did a good job it would look like it belongs there and could mine way more BTC then 200 PC's.
When crypto was huge 3-4 years ago i made more selling mining rigs then i would have using them for mining |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:50:00 PM EDT
[#26]
This is pretty common. Just leave the old servers in the racks and put Nicehash on them. Usually the security guys will find it but they may just want a cut if the profits.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:50:04 PM EDT
[#27]
That's been going on for years..
More in the early days, now it takes dedicated processors |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:50:53 PM EDT
[#28]
I know people that have done this. It was eventually found out. And they were fired over it.
The guy I know that did it might have had close to 1,000 desktops mining for him. We never found out the exact count or what he made off of it. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:52:16 PM EDT
[#29]
Quote HistoryQuoted: I am surprised its not done more. As was said make all the computers run it off hours, net work traffic should stay the same low level but the individual computers running 100% all night. The next thing that has surprised me is that some one has not written a worm to go in to peoples computers at their houses and mine at night. Dont do any damage to the computer that antivirus would pick up, basically just start mining after the screen saver is on for say 30 mins or an hour, and have it keep the screen off unless the keyboard or mouse turns it on then suspend the mining. edit, doing this you could have 10,000 or more computers doing the work The last one has been done with chrome/ie/firefox extensions. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 12:59:00 PM EDT
[#30]
Mine Bitcoin on PC's? No.
Mine Monero on PCs? Absolutely. Install XMRig on all of the PCs, set them to run the miner in the background, get paid. You can tailor XMRig's json to run as few or as many threads/cores as you like to reduce or increase the load. The command line is simple and the process doesn't take much electricity to run. The XMR pool I mine with has to have handful of guys doing just that. There is no way on Earth there is some guy with a warehouse full of computers running 3950s or 3900s. Just isn't worth the effort. The top miner in this pool is running at about 69 Mh/s. By comparison, an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 runs about about 4Kh/s. If I recall correctly, the 3950x runs at about 19Kh/s. Either the guy has 3600+ AMD Ryzen 3950s or he's using the resources of a somewhat large company to mine. With that 69Mh/s, the guy could theoretically be pulling down north of $5,000 per day, assuming he's not the one paying the power bill. That also assumes Monero remains at its current price of $159. It has been hanging around that mark lately, moving maybe $10-30 down from time to time. If it's a company that has a lot of Radeon Pro WX GPUs, assuming the same size company, with each computer having a WX4100, he might be making closer to $6,000 per month mining ETH but that would be FAR more noticeable. The power bill would be through the roof! Those cards are horribly efficient at mining, using around 180 watts each to produce less than $2/day each. It seems like most people get caught because of the far increased power consumption. It is very obvious. I got a letter from my power company the other day. It is really just a comparison o my power use compared to the most efficient house in my neighborhood and the average house in my neighborhood. I think my power use was triple theirs. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:03:22 PM EDT
[#31]
Quote HistoryQuoted: When I was at UNCC all the computers in every engineering lab ran SETI.... Quote HistoryQuoted: Quoted: As someone else pointed out doing this (now) on 200 computers is stupid & pointless. I do recall a local employee at a school district around here running SETI@home on all the PCs in the district. Guy basically cost the district millions with the PCs running 24/7/365 at 100% when you talk about hardware lifespan, HVAC, electricity, etc. For fucking aliens... When I was at UNCC all the computers in every engineering lab ran SETI.... there's a difference between a division within an employer saying "we shall do this" and a rogue employee doing it behind everyone's backs. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:06:23 PM EDT
[#32]
I didn't think you could even mine Bitcoin with a CPU any more or maybe you can but it's a slim chance of ever actually mining any.
Everything has moved to GPU now. Which is the reason no one can get a damn video card. I thought. 
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:06:29 PM EDT
[#33]
We host wordpress instances for our clients website's and for the most part that infrastructure is small, reliable, and pretty much ran in the background without any notice.
About four years ago while I was on vacation I started getting notifications that utilization was much higher on the servers, to the point that the CPUs couldn't keep up with the demand and service was failing. The guy back at the office was useless at figuring out what was going on and one of our clients made a demand that we need new hardware immediately to address this problem, one with more CPU cores. The whole thing was getting pretty suspicious but I was on vacation and trusted the other IT guy would have the common sense to say that no, wordpress doesn't need dozens of cores for it and that a client shouldn't be making demands like that. My trust was soon completely destroyed as I proceeded to get a server quote from Dell with the highest core count Xeons (24 cores I think was the max at the time?) for an ungodly amount. I was told the Client provided "free" advice in building out this server, something which my colleague was proud of for something. After a few choice words of how dumb the situation was I put a hold on my vacation, dug out the laptop, and started looking around. First stop was the pushy client's wordpress install which had mysteriously had a new plugin installed. That plugin? It uses PHP to mine bitcoins, and paid the user 25% of all proceeds while the write of the plugin banked the rest. A quick uninstall and a lock of their account and the entire infrastructure was back to normal. It was a fun call between the owners of my company, the owners of our client, their IT people and me while we had a nice discussion of how no, we weren't going to spend tens of thousands of dollars so that they could make literal pennies at our expense. Their IT's defense was "Well when you gave us that wordpress install you said we had control of the plugins." which somehow made it ok, I guess. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:15:37 PM EDT
[#34]
Quote HistoryQuoted: When I worked at Gateway 2000 in the 1990s, the VP of tech support was a huge alien guy. Ted Waite, the owner, and him had SETI installed on everyone's computer that worked in tech support. Similar thing where I used to work. The IT guys (before me) has SETI running on all the school district's computers. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:18:08 PM EDT
[#35]
Quoted: That's not an actual headline and I know nothing about Bitcoin, but I'm surprised we haven't seen an occurrence of this yet. Theoretically, could an IT admin in some small sector business with complete control and trust over their fleet of PC's use them to mine Bitcoin without them knowing? I can just hear secretary Sally afterward, "well my computer always ran a little slow but I didn't think anything of it, and Jimmy the IT kid seemed really nice." Also, to not get caught immediately, would mean that the mining would have to be severely handicapped so the end user doesn't notice a performance hit. Do it on enough PCs, and it can turn over a decent amount of cash... but I'm thinking it would have to be thousands of "Business class" PCs. Like seriously, how much would a Dell Optiplex,... running for 8-12 hours a day (assuming the PCs are shut down during off hours), 5 days a week, earn? My wild ass guess, assuming the IT professional was smart and ensured the mining program mined at a reduced level for stealth reasons... I'd guess something like a Dell Optiplex or similar would probably mine $1/worth of crypto per week. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:20:19 PM EDT
[#36]
Didn't you know, idle CPU is a bad thing.
 The best model to do such is the SETI model. 98% of cpu time out there is idle time ! |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:20:25 PM EDT
[#37]
200 off the shelf PCs working together could maybe mine $0.87 worth of Bitcoin per day...maybe.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:20:54 PM EDT
[#38]
Quote HistoryQuoted: As someone else pointed out doing this (now) on 200 computers is stupid & pointless. I do recall a local employee at a school district around here running SETI@home on all the PCs in the district. Guy basically cost the district millions with the PCs running 24/7/365 at 100% when you talk about hardware lifespan, HVAC, electricity, etc. For fucking aliens... For a time, I worked for AOL after they acquired Netscape. They had a bunch of re-purposed Netscape IT and a few "borrowed" from Sun Microsystems. These guys were used to much more freedom in how they did their jobs. AOL management found out that STI@home was installed on most of their servers, and had a blue fit about it. The general consensus was that they were just worried that it would out them before they completed taking over the Earth by burying it in a sea of unwanted CDs. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:21:12 PM EDT
[#39]
You can’t mine Bitcoin with a normal computer, not even with a GPU, anyways so... this story is most likely incorrect.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:21:25 PM EDT
[#40]
Quote HistoryQuoted: I could do it with about an hour of work, over a thousand computers Bitcoin mining isn't worth it anymore tho 200 computers? Lol |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:25:07 PM EDT
[#41]
Quote HistoryQuoted: You can’t mine Bitcoin with a normal computer, not even with a GPU, anyways so... this story is most likely incorrect.  You were wrong and you decided to make yourself even more wrong with the edit. It's true you likely won't ever make your money back, but it is possible on most any computer if you feel like heating up a room and wasting some electricity. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:29:01 PM EDT
[#42]
We actually had that exact thing happen, it was in the earlier days of Bitcoin but an IT employee was mining at work using multiple computers. A fellow IT employe walked into a cubicle dead end and saw equipment all set up and turned it in. I don't think he had a big operation or anything but sounds like he got away with it for a half year or so. He was fired and there was an investigation, not sure the end result...
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:33:35 PM EDT
[#43]
Quote HistoryQuoted: When I was at UNCC all the computers in every engineering lab ran SETI.... See my ID. Guess who else is known for doing that... |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:35:21 PM EDT
[#44]
What makes you think they aren't doing this stuff?
Back during the "@home" craze people were getting busted doing those projects for no financial gain (only bragging points) at universities, corporations, etc. I am sort of surprised there isn't malware quietly installing and running bitcoin mining. If it was sneaky enough and didn't break shit, people wouldn't even notice. FYI, it takes so much processing power now to make headway it's guys with warehouses full of GPUs doing it. The days of just running a computer 24/7 with it are long gone. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:38:03 PM EDT
[#45]
Can someone explain the SETI thing to me?
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:38:49 PM EDT
[#46]
Quote HistoryQuoted: You were wrong and you decided to make yourself even more wrong with the edit. It's true you likely won't ever make your money back, but it is possible on most any computer if you feel like heating up a room and wasting some electricity. Quote HistoryQuoted: Quoted: You can’t mine Bitcoin with a normal computer, not even with a GPU, anyways so... this story is most likely incorrect. You were wrong and you decided to make yourself even more wrong with the edit. It's true you likely won't ever make your money back, but it is possible on most any computer if you feel like heating up a room and wasting some electricity. Well technically you wouldn't be mining bitcoin. You'd be mining some alt like monero or such and converting it to bitcoin. The mass media doesn't know the difference. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:39:26 PM EDT
[#47]
I could have our CAD systems do it on the off hours and weekends and no one would know a thing.
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:42:14 PM EDT
[#48]
Quote HistoryQuoted: 200 off the shelf PCs working together could maybe mine $0.87 worth of Bitcoin per day...maybe. The random driveby cryptojacker doesn't give a shit. They're using automation to find a vulnerable host and if they don't find anything better worth stealing or can't move laterally within the organization they might leave that cryptominer behind, because "why not?". It's like a joy riding car thief taking a shit in your car after he's done with it. |
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:45:42 PM EDT
[#49]
I may have known someone who was going to use a room in a abandon mall (Mall still had power).
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Posted: 1/16/2021 1:50:12 PM EDT
[#50]
Quote HistoryQuoted: I could do it with about an hour of work, over a thousand computers Bitcoin mining isn’t worth it anymore tho 200 computers? Lol When you aren’t paying for the electricity or hardware it’s probably profitable over time. There’s that while getting fired issue though. |
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