Mining bitcoin is one of the most profitable activities in recent times. However, it requires a significant investment in infrastructure and high energy costs that must be taken into account because otherwise the profitability is minimal.
A Spanish couple wanted to avoid these costs (and at the same time obtain the profits) by using as hardware to mine bitcoin the computers that are used as sales terminals in department stores in that country.
That’s right, by introducing a malware (a virus) they were mining cryptocurrencies from a distance. They did it in MediaMarkt, a multinational chain of German origin dedicated to the sale of electronic products with more than a thousand stores in Europe, and in branches of the renowned El Corte Inglés.
The operation was discovered by the Catalan police, since the stores where they were mining were in Tarragona.
They were discovered, as described The vanguard, thanks to the security cameras. In the images, the couple was seen installing different mining programs on the sales computers of these shopping centers.
Store employees did not detect anything abnormal, as the mining process was taking place in the background.
They used more than 20 computers to mine free bitcoin at the same time.
The “miners” had access to the sales terminals of these businesses because they are freely available to the public and are used by customers for their transactions.
According to MediaMarkt and El Corte Inglés, they had previously had attacks on the terminals, but never to do crypto mining.
The activity was discovered because some computers began to fail and the fans to make too much noise, even though they were supposedly not being used. Computer technicians checked the terminals and discovered that they had been tampered with.
Cryptocurrency mining on computers exposed for sale … https://t.co/1IQlpSAkNG
– Mayka Navarro (@maykanavarro) November 22, 2021
The strategy was the one that is usually used in stores for other types of robberies, less sophisticated. According to the cameras, a woman asked an employee for help to fix a notebook she had bought, distracting the workers. At that time, the man who accompanied her accessed the machines and connected a USB to download the malware.
Bitcoin mining demands high volumes of electricity. Is that the mathematical operations that must be performed to generate new tokens and to guarantee the security of the transactions are so many and so complex that hundreds of thousands of processors must work day and night to execute them.
It is undoubtedly the weakest point of bitcoin and its independent finance proposal from global centralized bodies.
An investigation published by Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance claims that bitcoin mining consumes 121.8 Tera Watts per year.
They are numbers for February 2021.
To be able to compare, suffice it to say that all of Argentina consumes 121 TW per year.