University. The time for partying, studying and finding yourself. Or is it? A Cisco report has suggested otherwise, claiming students have decided to use their time to get into Bitcoin mining.
Last month, the technology company Cisco (Cisco) released a digital currency mining research report titled “College students are using campus power mining .”
Cisco security researcher Austin McBride claimed that at present, the university campus has become the second largest source of encrypted digital currency after energy and utilities , with traffic accounting for 22% of the industry.
The students are reportedly lured in by the fact that they don’t have to pay for the electricity bill as the university usually accounts for the bill. According to McBride, for the students the situation is a no brainer:
“You leave [the mining rig] running in your dorm for four years, you walk out of college with a big chunk of change,” he added,”You can run your mining rig in your dorm or school library and not worry about those costs eating into your mining profitability.”
Not all encrypted digital currency mining is done by students voluntarily as hackers can use malicious software to attack the student’s personal computer and secretly conduct digital currency mining.
Cisco picked up on this rising trend through its Umbrella security product. Umbrella monitors clients’ network connections to test for any possible malicious activity, including crypto mining.
This is not the first instance of someone pointing out students mining activity at their campus. CoinRivet reported on an Indonesian student being arrested in South Korea following suspicions that he had been illegally mining cryptocurrency on college computers.
