In Pennsylvania, university students are actively mining cryptocurrency

Patrick Sines, a Penn State graduate, recently revealed that he mined cryptocurrencies for passive income throughout his undergraduate program. Sines notes that passive income on digital currencies is a very convenient method of earning money.

“It was like passive income because when I did homework, took an exam or went to student meetings, the device in my room earned me money.”

The Pennsylvania State University graduate noted that he encountered some problems, for example, his miner was overheating very much. “It was unbearable, I had the fans running, but I still had to open the windows,” he said.

Notably, excessive heat generation and high energy costs are not the only problems associated with cryptocurrency mining. Recently, there has been an increase in the use of malware to hijack the processing power of an unsuspecting user's computer.

Mike Banich, vice president of marketing at security software company Vectra, said: “Cryptocurrency mining often occurs as a stealth attack. The attacker downloads malware that the victim downloads and makes money from the operation of her computer.”.

Banich added that hackers can use powerful mining devices to carry out attacks on individuals and organizations. Often people don't think about these problems until their computer fails. 

Despite the risks involved, cryptocurrency mining has become a very common way to make money on college campuses. According to Vectra's research, 11 out of 11 campuses visited by the company had students engaged in cryptocurrency mining. According to the study, up to four new mining devices appear on each campus every day.

This is a fairly serious problem, since mining software interacts with computer networks around the world, which makes the system extremely vulnerable to external attacks. According to Banich, hackers could penetrate a student's PC and then attack the university's network. According to Patrick Sines, there have not yet been such cases in the state of Pennsylvania. He said: "I think it's not a serious vulnerability and it's something that educational institutions should be held accountable for. I don't think mining weakens their defenses that much."..

According to him, cryptocurrency mining helped him understand the new financial technology and the operation of the blockchain. Sines said he made more than $10,000 from mining the cryptocurrency, but it cost him $4,700 to mine one bitcoin. Согласно информации Vectra, это почти 10% от стоимости обучения за год в большинстве приватных университетов.

According to cryptoglobe.com