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An engineer from Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, was jailed for mining Monero on about 200 of the company’s servers. According to a March 16 report by local media Abacus News, the employee eventually sold the Monero for about 100,000 yuan ($ 14,300).
Large-scale crypto-jacking
The senior engineer, An Bang, was hired by Baidu to maintain its search engine. However, between April and July 2018, he downloaded and installed scripts to mine the cryptocurrency, Monero, on around 200 of the company’s servers.
Baidu contacted the police when it noticed unexpected activity levels on several of the servers. By the time An was captured, he had already mined and sold Monero for the equivalent of $ 14,300.
An was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 11,000 yuan ($ 1,570) last month for illegally taking over a computer system.
Cryptocurrency exchanges are prohibited, but mining is not
As Cointelegraph reported last November, Chinese authorities removed Bitcoin mining from their list of unwanted industries, essentially discarding a previously proposed plan to ban the activity.
However, trading in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has been banned in the country, with authorities promising to crack down on the activity. China is believed to be one of the nations closest to launching its own central bank digital currency (CBDC), although the outbreak of the coronavirus is likely to delay these plans.
