Russian nuclear center engineers caught mining Bitcoins on a supercomputer
As Telegram channel “Mash” reports, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers arrested engineers of a secret nuclear center in Sarov, who tried to mine a Bitcoin on a supercomputer. The computer did not have internet access but the culprits solved this problem by connecting to the internal network.
Employees of the nuclear safety control department quickly detected the connection of new devices to the network and apprehended the two engineers, who were immediately turned over to FSB officers. The men signed a written pledge not to leave the premises. According to Mash, they could be charged with treason.
The Supercomputer in the Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod region was launched in 2011. According to information from open sources, by 2018-2020, the machine’s computing capacity was planned to be increased to one exaflop, that is one quintillion (10 to 18th degree) of floating point operations per second.