The Australian Federal Police (AFP) investigate two employees at the Bureau of Meteorology for allegedly using its computers to mine cryptocurrencies.
On February 28th, the authorities executed a search warrant at the bureau's office in Melbourne, and questioned the IT workers, while the rest of the bureau’s IT team were held in a conference room and told to wait.
According to Chris Berg from the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the suspected employees could either have been using the bureau's computational power to mine for cryptocurrencies, or using its electricity to avoid paying their own electrical bills.
"One possibility is that they're trying to use some of the equipment that the Bureau of Meteorology have. The Bureau of Meteorology has some very fast computers. Another possibility, though, is that they're just trying to get the Bureau of Meteorology to pay for the electricity. Mining is a very electricity-intensive task and they probably didn't want to pay for it themselves."
Mining cryptocurrency requires very powerful computers and consumes a huge amount of electricity.
It involves the process of solving complex equations, and miners are rewarded in newly released currency. The computational puzzles become progressively harder over time and require more and more processing power.
The price of the popular Bitcoin is very unstable, but overall it's still escalating. For this reason, many people started their own bet into mining digital coins.
While mining cryptocurrency is not illegal, the use of the bureau’s computers to carry out the process could be an illegal use of government resources. This news comes just a month after the Bureau of Meteorology apologized for hosting fake ads that directed people to a Bitcoin scam.
Previously, a similar use of government's resources happened in Russia where several nuclear engineers were arrested after attempting to use Russia's supercomputers at a nuclear facility to cryptocurrency.
