I hang out with a lot of IT types and CIO’s in particular so I hear a lot of strange things when we get together over a few beers. But even after all this time, sometimes I’m taken aback by something they say. The most recent case was when the head of security audit company mentioned to me that he had recently discovered that several IT managers in his network were “mining Bitcoins” on their networks. This was surprising for several reasons but not the least of which was because this “mining” inherently causes security problems and the culprits were not some guys in R&D but the actual network administrators or their managers. To put it another way, this was the castle guards opening the gates to welcome the vagabonds into the fortress they were supposed to protect. In short they should have known better. For a bit more on the security risks of Bitcoin mining check out . Trend Micros’ article on the subject
And when this practice is done during the business day, system performance could be significantly degraded.