Police of Poland

History

2021: Cryptocurrency was mined on the equipment of the main office of the Polish police

On August 2, 2021, it became known that officers of the Polish National Police discovered a cryptocurrency mining farm at the Police headquarters, which local media called mining.

Mining, allegedly, was organized by an IT specialist, a civilian employee of a law enforcement agency, according to the local news portal tvn24.pl, citing two independent sources.

Miner used police computers, which he upgraded using video cards and specialized software. Although mining equipment consumed a serious amount of electricity due to the energy-intensive process of extracting currency, the most worrying is that records from the police database could have been leaked, one source noted.

Cryptocurrency was mined on the equipment of the main office of the Polish police

The computer network stores a lot of confidential information, such as employee reports on steps during the investigation and other digital files. Police officials insist that their database has not been hacked, and no violations have yet been found in the internal police data network.

Unfortunately, this happened on the territory of the police station, but it should be noted that at no stage did the suspect have access to police databases, "said police spokesman Mariusz Charka.

The representative of the Polish police added that the case has already been transferred to the district prosecutor's office in Warsaw, as the investigation is ongoing. Currently, experts are working on estimating losses to the police service in terms of the amount of electricity used to extract digital currency.

Cryptocurrency mining is a process during which computers extract new virtual currency both through mass transaction confirmation and requires a huge amount of energy and computing power. This process usually involves a large number of complex computers that form a specially designed farm that performs the complex calculations necessary to maintain a cryptocurrency network. Although this process requires a lot of energy, it can be profitable because as of August 2, 2021, the cost of each bitcoin exceeds $39 thousand.^[1]

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