Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

CryptoCurrency Miner Plays Hide-and-seek with Popular Games and Tools

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 14 2018, @11:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-we-need-new-tools dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

When the CPU utilization on a computer is high, games become less responsive, frame rate goes down, and gameplay stutters. To diagnose these problems, users will commonly open process manager utilities such as Task Manager, Process Explorer, or Process Hacker to determine if any processes are using too much of the CPU power.

Knowing this, the developer of this mining Trojan does something pretty clever; they terminate the miner when the processes for popular games or process managers are launched. This causes the computer to appear to be operating normally when running certain games and when trying diagnose CPU utilization.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cryptocurrency-miner-plays-hide-and-seek-with-popular-games-and-tools/

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
CryptoCurrency Miner Plays Hide-and-seek with Popular Games and Tools | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 9 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:54PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:54PM (#692942)

    So the easy solution is to have the task manager launch on boot? That would prevent the mining trojan from ever running, right?

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Funny=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by higuita on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:25PM (1 child)

    by higuita (2465) on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:25PM (#692957)

    or simply run linux! :D

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:32PM (#693994)
    Hmm I usually have it running all the time. Is that why I haven't got such malware? :)

    When you minimize it it shows up as a CPU usage indicator in the system tray, so you can monitor CPU usage even without having it in foreground.