On July 2, a Japanese district court sentenced to imprisonment a 24-year-old man who was found guilty in a remote crypto mining case, Japanese media outlet Mainichi reports.
The unemployed Masato Yasuda, who lives in the city of Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, used a remote mining tool enabling him to use other people’s personal computers without their knowledge or consent for remote cryptocurrency mining.
By doing this, Yasuda violated the law that prohibits creating and distributing computer viruses. Also, "the crime was cunning as it abused programming knowledge and skills,” Judge Ryo Kato emphasized, urging not to disregard “the social impact of the crime.”
As a result, the Sendai District Court sentenced Yasuda to one year in prison, although the sentence was suspended for three years, since “the defendant regretted what he did, and was learning information ethics”, according to Kato. Regardless, this sets an important legal precedent including a jail sentence for mining abuse.
Notably, it followed a number of reports about arrests made by the Japanese police in ten prefectures in relation to other cases of remote mining, or “cryptojacking”, where hackers infected other users’ devices with malware in order to use their victims’ computing power for mining cryptocurrencies.
In particular, the police investigation was aimed against those using Coinhive, crypto mining software which has recently been identified as one of the top malware threats to Internet users due to its high popularity among cybercriminals using it as a hacking tool to hijack computers.
However, Yasuda’s case is different, since the remote tool he used was not installed on a website lurking and waiting for visitors. Instead, he embedded a mining program into a cheat tool promising advantageous online game advances, and released it on his blog.
In Japan, such cheating programs are often considered as illegal since they violate the national law on Unfair Competition Prevention.
The incidents in Japan mirror the significant rise in the number of cryptojacking cases in Q1 2018, MacAfee Lab’s latest report shows.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
