What do you do when you have access to a massive electrical power source and you’re looking to make a bit more money? The staff at the state owned South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant in Yuzhnoukrainsk reckoned that a recent spike in cryptocurrency trading prices provided the perfect incentive to hook up their mining rigs to the plant’s internal administrative network.

It wasn’t the first time that cryptocurrency miners hacked into networks to mine cryptocurrencies. This process is also often called cryptojacking: a cryptojacker “finds a way to harness the processing power of computers she doesn’t own — or pay the electrical bills on,” as Wired explains it.

Vinay Gupta, a blockchain strategist who — among others — helped coordinate the second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum’s 2015 release, tells me that people have long used computing resources to illicitly mine bitcoin. “Usually this story is inconsequential – say a few thousand machines in a university,” says Gupta.

Cryptojacking was a major problem in 2018, when a mining startup called Coinhive launched an easy-to-use mining module — a tool which was used by malicious groups to exploit highly trafficked websites.