South Africa's flagship supercomputer is back online after it was hacked to mine crypto

[Luis]

Good news about South Africa's flagship supercomputer which was hacked to mine cryptocurrency

The CSIR's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has notified users that its Lengau compute cluster is operational after weeks of downtime following a serious security breach.

In June, the CHPC shut down access to the supercomputer after attackers gained access to it and infected it with crypto mining malware.

 

[Bad Ballie]

So who actually uses this monster and what for?

 

[ArmatageShanks]

I wonder how much they made with it?

 

[dualmeister]

 

[Gordon_R]

So who actually uses this monster and what for?

It's in the OP:

Lengau supports researchers across South Africa and elsewhere in Africa in areas including climate and weather modelling, drug discovery, seismic modelling, fluid dynamics, and artificial intelligence.

It is also used in astronomy, including the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and MeerKAT, computational chemistry, materials science, and bioinformatics and genomics.

 

[Swa]

When you mine go big.

 

[konfab]

The new procedures contain three layers of security: multifactor authentication to the CHPC user portal, virtual private network into the CHPC network, and SSH login to the cluster using private keys.

“As part of the new security policy, only verified institutional or company email addresses may now be used to register for access to the Lengau cluster,” Janse van Rensburg said.

“Personal email addresses (such as Gmail) are no longer accepted. Users currently registered with personal email addresses will temporarily be blocked from accessing the Lengau cluster.”

Good to know that the various VPSs I have been looking after in one way or another have all had better security than SA's premium supercomputer.

I would say they need to have monthly key rotation. Would be a PITA but basically a necessity with that many people.

 

[brattex]

Ha. Fun photo. The middle rack in the title photo is parts of Stampede from TACC, courtesy of my project