Chinese Internet Giant Baidu Employee Imprisoned For Mining Monero On Company Servers

Recently, an employee used Baidu’s massive range of servers to mine Monero coins. As per a report from China-centric news site Abacus on Monday, a senior engineer working on Baidu’s popular search engine, An Bang downloaded the Monero, which is a privacy-focussed cryptocurrency, mining scripts onto over two hundred company servers between the months of April and June 2018.

The company eventually noticed the additional load on the internal systems. Subsequent to that, it reported the incident to the local police. This led to the arrest of the accused. The accused was finally sentenced to imprisonment of three years. In addition to that, a fine of eleven thousand Chinese yuan (over fifteen hundred USD) is imposed on him, according to the report.

It is to be noted that the aforementioned case is the latest in a range of cases where employees have inappropriately used the ease of access to workplace power or infrastructure in order to make some free and easy money.

Lately in Russia, a group of scientists at a major secret nuclear laboratory were granted time in a similar crime scenario. In addition to that, staff members working at the court system and railways were recently caught in Ukraine for doing illicit mining activities.