A Texas school district has hit Google headlines as one of its employees was caught mining cryptocurrency without permission of the school management or the government officials.
Galveston Independent School District (Galveston ISD) is the educational institution in discussion and the name of the employee found guilty is withheld.
According a source reporting from the IT department of Galveston Independent School District (GISD), an employee has installed cryptocurrency mining hardware and software at 6 of the locations belonging to the school district without the authorization of the school management, IT staff and the government officials.
Dr. Jerry Gibson, the superintendent of the school, acknowledged the media reports as true and confirmed that the employee has been dismissed from duty and has been handed over to the law enforcement.
Going deep into the details, from the past three months, the IT staff was surprised to see an increase in traffic passing through the school districts’ firewall and the amount of power the school servers were consuming.
They launched an inquiry and found that a former employee of Galveston ISD was using the school’s IT resources for his personal needs of mining bitcoins and Monero.
An investigation has been launched on this note and a detailed inquiry into how district students, staff and management were using the IT resources and how such discrepancies such as crypto mining were taking place. And a separate IT probe has been ordered to audit the entire IT infrastructure of the school district to find any malware or botnet operations.
The incident was identified at the end of March this year and on April 8th, 2022; the employee was asked to submit a resignation and now the issue has been forwarded to the district attorney’s office.
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