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!