Jonathan Khoo: CSIRO bod mined cryptocurrency with super computers
A top government worker employed at the CSIRO research centre in Marsfield has been sentenced after he used state super computers to mine cryptocurrency. It has now been revealed how he did it and why his actions had a detrimental effect on the navy.
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A disgraced former employee at the CSIRO used government “super computers” to mine cryptocurrency and make more than $9000 in the process, a court has heard.
Jonathan Meizhi Khoo, 34, was sacked from his position at the government-run Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) after his offending was uncovered in February 2018.
A police investigation was also launched and he was sentenced in the Downing Centre Local Court on Friday for one charge of cause unauthorised modification of computer data.
The Killara man narrowly avoided being sent to prison and was sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 15 months to be served by way of intensive correction in the community.
The court heard the highly intelligent and well-educated employee was working in a data archiving and software support role for the CSIRO Astronomy and Space department, based in Marsfield, during the offending in January and February 2018.
The court heard he had access to “super computers” as part of his position and misused them to mine cryptocurrencies for a financial gain.
“The CSIRO operates a number of computer servers and high performance computing (HPC) resources, also known as super computers,” the agreed facts stated.
“Computers that offer a high amount of automated processing capacity … are better enabled to return greater rewards for mining cryptocurrencies.”
A court heard he installed command scripts onto the super computers and made the equivalent of $9420 in cryptocurrency in the space of a month.
“The processing power of these CSIRO HPCs generated monero cryptocurrency mining proceeds which were deposited to the defendant’s monero cryptocurrency wallet account,” the agreed facts stated.
The court heard this resulted in a loss of processing power for the CSIRO which impacted other legitimate jobs including for the navy, Victor Chang Institute, and climate modelling.
Those delays were later assessed to have a financial cost of about $76,000.
The prosecutor said on Friday these super computers were nationally significant resources and Khoo had misused his trusted position to interfere with them.
“They are a scarce resource for the CSIRO which multiple parties are competing for the use of.”
Magistrate Erin Kennedy said his offending was reckless and could have caused further issues for the CSIRO, which does extraordinary work within the community.
“This was reckless on the part of the offender to disregard what disturbance he could have caused by accessing such a sophisticated system.”
On top of his intensive corrections order, she also convicted him and sentenced him to 300 hours community service work and ordered he continue counselling for his ADHD.
The court heard he was currently unemployed.