Monday, July 19th 2021
Ukrainian Police Close Illegal Mining Farm with 3800 PlayStation 4 Consoles
The Ukrainian Security Service (USS) have recently exposed a large illegal cryptocurrency mining operation in the city of Vinnytsia. The mining farm was illegally connected to the power grid stealing power so efficiency didn't appear to be a major concern. The SSU seized 3800 game consoles, 500 graphics cards, 50 processors, and various documents with information of the operation. This is the first time we have seen the PlayStation 4 being used to mine Cryptocurrency however the idea isn't insane with various older consoles having been programmed to do so. The PlayStation 4 features an AMD GPU with 18 Compute Units and roughly 1.84 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance while the PlayStation 4 Pro offers 4.2 TFLOPs.
Update Jul 19th: We have learned that these PlayStation 4 consoles were not being used for cryptocurrency mining and instead were part of a FIFA bot farm creating and leveling up accounts that could later be sold.
Sources:
Ukrainian Security Service, Delo
Update Jul 19th: We have learned that these PlayStation 4 consoles were not being used for cryptocurrency mining and instead were part of a FIFA bot farm creating and leveling up accounts that could later be sold.
46 Comments on Ukrainian Police Close Illegal Mining Farm with 3800 PlayStation 4 Consoles
I think companies are going to have to limit 1 per driver license or something.
I can’t even buy that much toilet paper ;) lol
This is still dumb as rocks, because as I said elsewhere, regarding mining with consoles:It's like mining on a very poor efficiency motherboard with a single weak gpu. People don't do this either.
so it probably like this they doing
BUT
A few years ago there was a way to mine on console and it required you to use the consoles built in browser to access a site that would allow you to mine through the browser for Monero. I do not know if that exists anymore. I am assuming it does or there is alternatives to it. Earnings were only like a couple cents per day though. But if they were stealing electricity and there is a coin alternative to Monero that was more efficient to mine with a console, then I can see them making bank on it.
Their whole scheme seemed to hinge on rigged meters and not paying for electric. Friggin lol.
@Chomiq I fail to see what this to do with this particular story those cpu's were probably destined for some shitty iNet/gaming cafe
But it looks to be specific to 5.05 firmware and if newer, then it may not be able to install. With that many PS4's that have been confiscated, and how little you would earn in mining with it, I will stick to the idea that the mining was done via a web browser based rather than this hack.
edit: I see there are other ways for newer firmware.
I guess it isn't so bad after all. A part of me thinks though that the added costs may not be worth it for mining like what, $0.08 a day? If that. Heck, as said earlier, they could have flipped those and probably earned more and legitimately (well I am assuming these weren't stolen and what not like the electricity was).
Up until now I wasn't keeping up with PS4 Linux development, so I did not even know that there's fully functional GPU acceleration and even a working AMDGPU-PRO driver.
Even so, the only reason this thing was viable even with stolen electricity, is probably because of stolen hardware as well.
Realistically, the best case scenario, is if they somehow managed to mine XMR, RVN, or VTC on these and achieved a performance level of at most 270X, it's still only gonna add up to ~$5/mo from each console (with a current rolling price on the used market at around $200).
Also, there's already an update to these news:
1) Given that СБУ also confiscated papers related to accounting and power usage, it is quite possible that power wasn't stolen in the first place(Vinnytsa oblenergo claims it wasn't stolen and it wasn't a mining operation). Our law enforcement tends to react first, and investigate later (e.g. guilty until proven innocent).
2) One of the more tech-savvy news outlets promptly noted that realistically this could've been a big botnet for online games(definitely more profitable and makes more sense than mining RVN or XMR at >2-3Y RoI not including operating expenses).
Given the ridiculousness of PS4 mining idea, I can also throw in a few more ideas on what this could've been used for: cheap Data center. With Gentoo fully operational, you can easily make more $$$ by renting out web hosts, or running a shitty unreliable VPS at below market price. Would be quite popular amongst
fucktards"customers" that run spambots, hammering SBM servers and e-mail addresses, compile illegal databases for call centers, or scraping local fleebay and other eBoards for personal information (names/phones/contacts), which is a hu-u-u-u-u-uge problem in Ukraine. But given the technical competence of our security service (or even cyber-police), I doubt they'll even check what's on these PS4s.