Indonesian student arrested in South Korea for illicit crypto mining on college computers

An Indonesian student has been arrested in South Korea following suspicions that he had been illegally mining cryptocurrency on college computers.

The 22-year-old was arrested on Tuesday February 12th after he had allegedly set up and operated software that allowed him to mine for cryptocurrency, the Korea Herald reports.

The software in question is ‘HoneyMiner,’ which is a program designed to mine Bitcoin and Monero.

The student is suspected to have initiated HoneyMiner on 27 computers in his college’s common computer room. The incident occurred in late January and the program operated for several days.

Even after his expulsion from the college, the man continued to run his illicit mining operation on the college computers.

The student enrolled in the college back in 2014. He studied at the college until 2018 but was expelled in September for missing registration.

He was caught in downtown Ulsan on Sunday. The police searched him on trespassing charges.

Song Young-seung, chief prosecuting attorney of the Ulsan District Court, issued the arrest warrant for the student after determining he could be a flight risk.

Reportedly, police will continue with the investigation to see whether the suspect has benefited from the illicit mining and whether he caused damage to the school.

Illicit crypto mining is nothing new and has been an ongoing issue for some time now. Usually, cryptojackers infect victims’ computer devices with malware to mine crypto for them.

The process usually goes unnoticed by the victims. Typically, the only side effect is victims’ computers slowing down.

However, this incident was spotted because the suspect had installed software as opposed to malware to conduct his mining activities.

Interested to read more about cryptojacking and illicit crypto mining? Discover more with our story on cryptojacking rising 44% in 2018 and how to protect yourself against the new cyber crime.