Canadian Extradited to US Over Cryptomining Hacks on University Supercomputers

Over three years, two Canadian nationals compromised university supercomputers across four US states to mine cryptocurrency, exploiting weak access controls and leveraging fraudulent VPN infrastructure to conceal their activity. The root cause lies in insufficient access control enforcement and failure to detect anomalous resource consumption on high-performance computing systems. Academic institutions often prioritize open access for research collaboration, inadvertently creating permissive environments that attackers can exploit. The prolonged duration of the campaign — three years — underscores a critical failure in monitoring and anomaly detection, since cryptomining generates distinctive, sustained CPU and GPU spikes that should trigger alerts. This incident matters because unauthorized use of research supercomputers disrupts legitimate academic work, wastes institutional resources, and demonstrates that even non-traditional targets hold significant value for cybercriminals.