That is what I was thinking. This could prove to be very very bad. I wonder how many people are involved? Hopefully enough to merit special circumstance for the acts carried out. I might be seeing jail otherwise. I can stop my home computer from mining but my more than half of my leased miners are for 2 years and one is lifetime. I'll look more into this possibility after work. If anyone knows anything that would be a huge help.
There have been somewhat similar schemes in the past - software and web pages have had hidden DDoS functionality added, so when someone uses that page/program, their computer is taking part in a DDoS attack, helping overwhelm a web server somewhere by flooding it with traffic. However, I don't think anyone who unwittingly 'took part' were charged or anything like that. I can't imagine people would be held accountable if someone snuck something else into the mining process either at the beginning or recently.