• Pyro@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    97
    ·
    1 year ago

    This happened to me not long ago when I found a monero miner running on my laptop. Being a highly technical person, I feel unbounded shame.

      • Pyro@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        1 year ago

        It was pretty easy to spot in htop since it had really high CPU usage. Plus, the command line args it launched with included the word “Monero” multiple times, so that was a bit of a giveaway haha

        • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I sometimes leave my laptop on, but the monitor turned off when I go to sleep. Sometimes when I wake up, the fans on the laptop will be running full speed, which dies down soon after I turn the monitor on and use the laptop for a little while. Do you think this might be a symptom of some covertware running on my laptop?

          • Pyro@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Perhaps.

            There may be easier ways to test for this, but what comes to mind is if you install your current OS again on another partition and then leave it as you usually do, and see if the fans do the same thing. If they do, it might just be a fault with the fan control or sleep state or something.

            If it doesn’t happen, I’d assume something fishy is going on. Maybe try and set up a script to log your CPU usage and what’s using the most every few minutes. That might catch something?
            I’ve just now had another thought. If it’s trying to be covert, maybe just leave your task manager / htop open and don’t touch anything for a while, it might think you’re afk and start running again. If it doesn’t, it could be checking to see if common monitoring tools are running and stopping itself to avoid detection, if that’s the case you’ll have to be a bit smarter about trying to catch it.

            tl;dr Maybe. Run a virus scan if you can, or try and find it yourself if you think you can. If all else fails, nuke the OS and start again.

            • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              That makes sense. In the end I guess it depends on what level any malware expects the user to search for it on. Thanks.

      • And009@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        I might be able to find a weird service or background app at most. Figuring out what is actually happening is beyond me.

    • havokdj@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      Was it still through WINE? I’d feel bad for the miner as well as it likely couldn’t have done the MSR mod so low hashrate lol.