A gaming software company has been slapped with a $1 million fine after secretly adding bitcoin mining software to a product update earlier this year.
E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) — which lets serious CounterStrike players face each other down in anti-cheat modes — infected about 14,000 of its customers with the code, which ended up mining about 30 bitcoins over two weeks last spring.
The company blamed a rogue employee, who has since been terminated. It’s still facing a class action over the matter in California. “What transpired the past two weeks is a case of an employee acting on his own and without authorization to access our community through our company’s resources,” ESEA co-founder Craig Levine told WIRED back in May.
The settlement was announced today by the New Jersey Attorney General, which says that ESEA will pay $325,000 of the fine upfront, and will only be hit with the rest of the penalty if it’s caught misbehaving over the next decade.
In a press release, the Attorney General’s office called the software a “botnet” that could monitor customers even when they weren’t using the ESEA software.
“These defendants illegally hijacked thousands of people’s personal computers without their knowledge or consent, and in doing so gained the ability to monitor their activities, mine for virtual currency that had real dollar value, and otherwise invade and damage their computers,” the AG’s office said.
Though they reached a settlement, ESEA and the New Jersey AG disagree over the facts of the case. The AG’s office says that company co-founder Eric Thunberg and software engineer Sean Hunczak were both involved in the scam. In a statement posted to its website, ESEA said the software was the work of a single engineer, presumably Hunczak, adding that the “press release issued by the Attorney General about our settlement represents a deep misunderstanding of the facts of the case, the nature of our business, and the technology in question.”
Thunberg is still with the company.
Back in the spring, those 30 bitcoins were worth only a few thousand dollars, but at today’s rates, it comes closer to $17,000.
The botnet’s haul was so good because six months ago, serious gamers like ESEA’s customers made excellent soldiers for a botnet army. Gaming machines have powerful graphical processing units that are pretty good at bitcoin mining. Since the spring, however, the bitcoin mining game has become a lot harder, and miners now use custom-designed chips to earn payouts on the bitcoin network.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by sonatine
