Baidu operation and maintenance personnel illegally controlled 155 servers for "mining": sentenced to three years in prison

In December 2017, the price of Bitcoin soared to $20,000. The climax of the currency circle not only attracted more buyers, but also a group of miners. Anbang, an employee of Baidu, is one of them.

Mining refers to a process of using the computing resources of the server CPU to obtain virtual currency, which requires high hardware configuration and power consumption. Compared with other "miners" who have to pay a lot of costs, Anbang has their own advantages. He is the operation and maintenance manager of Baidu's server. Taking advantage of his position, Anbang used the company's server to execute mining programs to obtain Bitcoins, making illegal profits of more than 100,000 yuan.

According to the person in charge of Baidu's Professional Ethics Construction Department, in early June 2018, Baidu discovered through its security management monitoring system that a large number of servers were operating abnormally, executing mining programs and occupying the computing resources of the company's servers. Baidu retrieved the backend operation logs and found that the operator was Anbang, a senior operation and maintenance engineer in Baidu's search operation and maintenance department.

According to An, from April 2018 to date, he used the iterm software on the Apple computer sent to him by the company to operate the central control machine that can control all servers, and then uploaded the mining script through the central control machine, and issued batch download instructions through the iterm software, allowing more than 200 servers to download the mining script. The mining script can upload Baidu's computing resources to the hash website, and the hash website mines Monero through the computing resources uploaded by it, and finally settles with it in Bitcoin according to the amount of computing resources uploaded by it. He withdrew Bitcoin from the hash website to the otcbtc.com website, and then sold Bitcoin for about 100,000 yuan through this website. At present, he still has about 1.44 Bitcoins in the wallet of the hash website, and about 1.5 Bitcoins in the otcbtc.com website.

On July 18, 2018, An was arrested by the public security organs and confessed the above-mentioned crime process after he was arrested. During the trial of this case, the defendant An returned RMB 111,000, which is now detained. The Haidian District People's Court of Beijing believes that the defendant An violated national regulations and used technical means to illegally control computer information systems. The circumstances are particularly serious. His behavior has constituted the crime of illegal control of computer information systems and should be punished. Although the defendant An defended the nature of his behavior, he was able to truthfully explain the process of his crime after he was arrested and during the trial. Therefore, he should be deemed to have confessed truthfully. At the same time, combined with his ability to return the illegal gains involved in the case, he can be given a lighter punishment.

It is hereby decided that:

1. The defendant An committed the crime of illegally controlling a computer information system and was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of RMB 11,000. 2. The RMB 111,000 seized in the case, of which RMB 100,000 was confiscated as illegal gains; RMB 11,000 of which was deducted from the fine. 3. A silver Apple laptop and a TOKEN key seized from the public security agency were returned to Beijing Baidu Netcom Technology Co., Ltd.; an Apple 4S mobile phone, an Apple 6 mobile phone, and a Huawei mobile phone were returned to the defendant An.

Here, the mining website reminds everyone to conduct scientific mining under the premise of complying with the law.