BATON ROUGE - Police arrested a college student after he allegedly installed malware on more than one hundred devices across different LSU computer labs over the course of about two years.

Campus police arrested Carlos Munoz-Salazar, 25, after a campus technology services employee found a USB drive he allegedly left in one of the infected computers.

Arrest records suggest the same device was used to install software on 169 different computers which allowed Munoz-Salazar to control them remotely. After gaining access, he then allegedly installed a program that allowed him to mine cryptocurrency from the university-owned computers. 

LSU employees said some computers were infected as far back as June 2018, and the "attacks" continued until the university's ITS department blocked the software on July 23, 2020. 

Police said the university was then able to use Munoz-Salazar's misplaced USB device to identify when he logged onto another computer at the school last week. An employee found Munoz-Salazar at the infected computer and took a photo of his student ID. 

Munoz-Salazar admitted to authorities he made about $2,500 from mining virtual currency on the university's computers. He was arrested Friday and booked on 169 counts of computer tampering and computer fraud.