Nuclear plant workers got caught mining Bitcoin off the REACTOR

Staff at Ukraine’s South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant in Mykolaiv province installed 6 Radeon RX 470 GPUs, a motherboard, cooling units, hard drives, extension cords and power supplies inside office No. 104 of the plant’s administrative wing
Even the National Guard soldiers stationed to physically protect the reactor were running their own rig on the side
Their setup had 16 more GPUs, 7 hard drives, 2 SSDs and a router
They plugged straight into the plant’s power grid and mined for free. Unlimited uninterruptible electricity and state funded cooling
The problem wasn’t the stolen power
The plant is classified as a Ukrainian state secret. Outside computer equipment is strictly forbidden inside the restricted zone, and the internal systems are supposed to be fully air gapped
But most importantly to never be connected to the public internet. The thing is, you can’t mine crypto offline so they ran a line out
The moment they plugged in, they blew a hole through the plant’s cybersecurity perimeter
Confidential materials about the facility’s physical protection systems, exactly what an adversary would need to plan an attack on a nuclear site and more leaked onto the open web
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) picked up the anomalous outbound traffic coming from a reactor that should not have been talking to the internet
On July 10, 2019 they raided the building with two separate seizures same day: one in the admin wing, one at the National Guard barracks on site
Criminal charges were filed against plant officials for disclosing state secrets
The kicker: this was a 2019 story. Bitcoin was around 10K which means 6 GPUs on a Radeon RX 470 setup were pulling maybe $15-25 a day in mining revenue at the time
They put a nuclear facility’s classified security architecture on the open web for what amounts to beer money
And it’s not the only one. The year before, engineers at Russia’s Federal Nuclear Center in Sarov were arrested for trying to mine Bitcoin on one of the country’s most powerful supercomputers
A machine kept permanently offline for security reasons. The instant they connected it to the internet to mine, the alarms went off
Turns out the hardest part of running a secret mining op inside a nuclear facility isn’t the hardware. It’s that the blockchain itself is the snitch