Has your PC or laptop developed strange habits? Does it not go to sleep/hibernate, is it getting too hot, is your performance sluggish? You may have a Cryptominer in your PC

A couple years ago, I was having all of the above problems. I would set my PC to sleep, walk out the room and I'd come back in and it would still be on. The CPU was idling at 50-60c with a very expensive CPU cooler on it. The fans seemed to be whirring constantly. On top of that, the games I played seemed to performing worse.

I'm no stranger to PC diagnosis, but this one had me stumped. Every time I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and looked in Task Manager, I couldn't find any trace of any program using my CPU, yet my PC seemed to be "in use" every hour of day.

Finally I noticed every time I checked my processes in the Task Manager, the temperature on my PC would start to drop and the fans stopped spinning.

I started to get sus and downloaded MalwareBytes which is a well-known tool for finding and kicking the shit out of viruses and malware. Thankfully, it's free to use so I had nothing to lose. I ran the scan on my C: Drive and immediately it found a Trojan.

MalwareBytes provided the name of this Trojan and on googling it, I found it was a stealth Monero Cryptominer – whenever you use normal methods to check for viruses, such as Task Manager, it turns itself off..

… Clever girl.

And as soon as you close Task Manager, it goes back on and continues mining.

Irritatingly, I have a Ryzen 3600 which is a pretty decent CPU so however that got on my machine, I probably earned them a fair bit of Monero!

If you're experiencing any of the above, give it a go. I reckon it got on my machine via a drive-by from a dodgy coin news website. But who knows. Check it out and see if you get anything!