60% of All Devices Mining Cryptocurrency Are on College Campuses, Study Shows

A new study reveals a huge number of college students may be mining cryptocurrencies on their university’s dime.

Vectra, a company that traditionally uses AI to uncover cyberattacks in real time, pointed its technology toward figuring out the top five industries that mine cryptocurrencies worldwide.

The surprising results revealed 60% of all the cryptocurrency mining detected is happening in higher education.

The report gathered intel from 14 different industries using 246 Vectra customers, analyzing traffic and metadata from 4.5 million devices. It found that the number of devices mining crypto has remained steady, even as Bitcoin lost 50% of its value in the current bear market.

Reliable access to power and internet is key to cryptocurrency mining, which is one obvious reason why college campuses and dorms are an attractive place to plug in. A revealing post on Reddit from November shows some colleges are getting wise to what’s happening.

After higher education, the study shows the next most popular industries with devices mining cryptocurrency are entertainment and leisure at 6%, financial services at 3%, technology at 3% and healthcare at 2%.

Government agencies have the lowest rates of crypto mining, likely due to stronger regulation, infrastructure and oversight.