Bitcoin heist with a twist: This time it's servers that were stolen

Icelandic police have cuffed 11 people in connection with four raids on data centres that targeted cryptocurrency mining equipment.

The raids started in December 2017 when three data centres were cracked in December. Another raid took place in January. 600 servers went missing in the heists.

Icelandic police kept the raids secret while they pursued their investigations. Those efforts culminated in 11 arrests and an appearance before the Reykjanes District Court last Friday. Two of the 11 were detained and the matter held over for another day.

The 600 servers are all still missing, the Associated Press reports. Which is no surprise: x86 kit is pretty generic. The real prize inside a bitcoin-mining rig is either GPUs, RAM or nicely fast solid-state disks. Those components are all tiny compared to servers and could probably have been posted out of Iceland piecemeal without much hassle.

Iceland has become something of a hub for demanding workloads like cryptocurrency mining because cheap energy and low ambient temperatures make it a low-cost destination to run data centres and the kit inside them. The nation also has a low crime rate. ®