2012-05-21 slashdot - Employee "Disciplined" For Installing Bitcoin Software...

[julz]

Employee "Disciplined" For Installing Bitcoin Software On Federal Webservers

2012-05-21

http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/05/21/1144244/employee-disciplined-for-installing-bitcoin-software-on-federal-webservers


"Around a year ago, a person working for the ABC in Australia with the highest levels of access to systems got caught caught with his fingers on the CPU cycles. The staffer had installed Bitcoin mining software on the systems used by the Australian broadcaster. While the story made a bit of a splash at the time, it was finally announced today that the staffer hadn't been sacked, but was merely being disciplined by his manager and having his access to systems restricted. All the stories seem a little vague as to what he actually installed however — on one side he installed the software on a public facing websever, and the ABC itself admits 'As this software was for a short time embedded within pages on the ABC website, visitors to these pages may have been exposed to the Bitcoin software' and 'the Coalition (current Opposition Parties) was planning on quizzing the ABC further about the issue, including filing a request for the code that would have been downloaded to users' machines,' but on the other side there is no mention of the staffer trying to seed a Bitcoin mining botnet through the site, just that mining software had been installed."

[SgtSpike]

Wasn't that the javascript bitcoin miner that everyone was going crazy with and installing on their webpages, despite it only getting like 250khps per visitor?

[da2ce7]

Wasn't that the javascript bitcoin miner that everyone was going crazy with and installing on their webpages, despite it only getting like 250khps per visitor?

None of the ABC (Australia) website were popular enough to produce any more than a trivial amount of bitcoins.

[PawShaker]

I think it is more an issue of broken trust. Public trusts ABC not to be manipulative and abusive. If ABC does not maintain procedures sufficient to prevent abuse of ABC's resources by its employees, how public can trust it?

On the other hand, it is a bit of storm in a glass of water. Not withstanding what I swrote above, the whole issue seems to be blown completly out of proportions by politicians and media in their services. The sad outcome is that decision makers are more preoccupied in throwing logs under each other feet than actually maintaining (not speaking about "leading") the country. Well that is why we need to put our governmen on an organic diet.