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He was an anonymous employee of Lamezia Terme airport but was able to jeopardize the airport’s cybersecurity by using the computing power of the local server to mine cryptocurrencies.

Suffice it to say that the Sacal technician, as the company that manages the IT services of Calabrian airports is called, was identified by the postal police and investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Catanzaro and Reggio Calabria for having carried out what in the world of cryptocurrencies is called “mining” or extracting, and with this expression heIt identifies the resolution of complex calculations by a machine to produce a cryptocurrency.

According to the reconstruction made by the postal police, the technician would have managed to install malware in the IT infrastructure of the Calabrian airport, thus exploiting the computing power generated by computers to extract, then produce, the Ethereum cryptocurrency.

In essence, the technician-hacker had created inside two rooms of theA “mining farm” at the airport. The abusive network consisted of five powerful computers capable of performing the complex calculations needed to mine the cryptocurrency.

With this system , the astute technician was able to produce Ethereum without spending on the electricity consumed by the machines, exploiting the internet connection of Sacal’s plants and, according to investigators, compromising airport IT security.

For him, most likely, it will be pains. But how is it possible that such complex systems can be hacked and exploited in this way? Certainly, the young technician’s in-depth knowledge of the systems could allow him to circumvent or disable the controls that should have been implemented to prevent the resources of a computing system from being used in cryptocurrency mining processes.

But what would have happened if the datacenter systems had been “leaned” on a Cloud Provider such as Amazon Web Service?

First, AWS performs preliminary environmental and geographic assessments before choosing a location. Availability Zones are built to be independent and physically separate from each other.

And that’s not all. Physical access points to server rooms are controlled by CCTV cameras, and authorized personnel use multi-factor authentication mechanisms to access data centers. In addition, the entrances to the server rooms are protected by devices that trigger an alarm and incident response in the event that the door remains open or is forced.

The present case, however, is representative of a growing phenomenon. With the advent of virtual currency, attacks by so-called “cybercriminals” have multiplied, trying to fraudulently withdraw energy or exploit the computing power of the computer systems of large industries, power plants or, as in this case, airports, for the operation of computers intended to extract cryptocurrency, through actions that seriously endanger the security and the very functioning of the affected industrial complexes.

There is a big “but” in this story because, as we have seen previously, if Sacal’s datacenters had been designed and managed by AWS, the Calabrian hacker could have “scrounged” at most the coffee at the bar from his colleagues.