For five years, an IT specialist at the Estonian Ministry of Defence, who had access to state secrets, mined cryptocurrency at the Emari military airbase and bought mining equipment with funds from the state budget. About this сообщает Eesti Ekspress.
Armin Annus joined the airbase’s meteorological monitoring department, where NATO fighter jets are based, in 2006. From 2015, he began stealing work computers for cryptocurrency mining, and also removed components from the base to sell them on online forums under the nickname armaani.
Data: Eesti Ekspress.
Over the next three years he built 17 mining devices using Air Force hardware.
The IT specialist was arrested in January 2019. In total, from 2015 to 2019, Armin Annus stole 190 different devices from the Ministry of Defence worth €48,900 and mined cryptocurrency worth €30,404. Electricity costs accounted for 60% of every €1,000 mined.
For illegal use of state equipment in November 2020 he was sentenced to 2.5 years on probation. The Estonian Prosecutor’s Office has no information about any possible leakage of information related to state secrets.
In 2018, three employees of the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov were accused of mining on a supercomputer. They were sentenced to various prison terms and fines.
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