As more cases of piggyback mining appear, it is important to find out if your computer is mining bitcoins secretly.
Hints of Your Computer is Mining Bitcoins
• The Performance is Slower Than Usual
• The Machine is Overheating
• Electricity Bill is Higher Than Usual
• You’ve Been Visiting Suspicious Websites
Mining costs will rise as long as the price of bitcoin rises. But as legal mining expands, illegal mining expands as well. The worst part of this is that any of us could fall victim to a cyberattack related to cryptocurrency mining.
The threat posed by malicious cryptocurrency mining, also known as cryptojacking, is increasing for both commercial entities and individual users. For the purpose of mining virtual currencies, unauthorized malware targets computers or mobile devices. The victims are unaware of it, too.
How can you tell if your computer is mining bitcoins? Let’s take a closer look at how to tell if your computer is mining bitcoins and what can be done.
Mining Explained Simply
Computer performance consumption is the foundation of the entire mining process. To put it simply, in order to earn coins for their work, miners must solve incredibly challenging mathematical problems. A crypto coin is produced when a mathematical puzzle is successfully solved. Everyone talks about mining at this point. Due to the large number of people engaged in the same activity and competing to complete these challenging tasks, miners have started to establish farms in an effort to increase their chances of success. A network of numerous computers, collectively known as “mining farms,” is involved. They specifically search for locations with cheap electricity in order to reduce the costs of the activity because the process is quite expensive in terms of electricity and equipment.
You haven’t been reading the most recent reports about the increase in the value of bitcoin if you keep asking yourself why they mine.
Why Are They Enslaving Your Computer?
It’s not just them; some website owners and miners have come to an agreement in order to work toward a common objective and gain from it. In enslaving your machine, both parties are interested. The purpose of publishing the content on these websites is to increase traffic—the number of readers and visitors—to the site. Making someone click on a specific ad is more difficult as people become smarter and more skeptical. The admins then recognized a business opportunity in providing the miners with the information they have gathered about site visitors.
How to Tell If Your Computer is Mining Bitcoins?
The first sign you have been “cryptojacked” (a term used to describe this secret mining activity), is by noticing the performance of your computer has been slower than usual. Given that you are the one who uses it constantly, you should be aware of this.
Programs, including an internet browser, take some time to load as well as the starting process. And you aren’t engaging in any unusual activity. The fact that you don’t have any processor-intensive games installed could be the reason for the slowdown. Despite the computer being much slower, the activity is the same.
Due to the difficulty in identifying these attacks, pay close attention to performance. You would assume that having a good anti-virus program would protect you, but this is not the case. Your anti-malware software cannot identify such attacks because they employ a legitimate script.
Overheating is another sign that the processor usage has some sort of effect on it. As we mentioned in the previous section, if the activity hasn’t changed but you notice the machine keeps getting hot, that’s a sign it might be used for mining.
Because these computers are a little better equipped and there is a lower chance that employees will notice than on private computers, you can anticipate this to occur in places like business venues.
A lot of electricity and high-quality equipment is needed for the task of mining. In light of this, if your electricity bill is higher than usual but you haven’t added any new home appliances, it may be a sign that you’ve been taken advantage of.
Everyone experiences it, and it is not always related to adult content. We described how websites entice users to click by stating intriguing images or article titles, based on which you end up being cryptojacked, in the first section of this article.
Most of the time, mining activity that enters your computer through a malicious application is what is enslaving you. Its main objective is to make another app permanently installed. The most frequent way to become a victim of this is when you visit websites for online movie streaming, music downloads, or via activation codes for online content. You unknowingly install this application for mining when you search for a program to download music or movies, along with the program itself.
What Can Be Done?
Check Your CPU Usage
It is easy to identify whether something is actually consuming your processing power by opening your computer’s resource manager and checking the CPU usage.
It is easy to tell when Javascript is running and using your processing power when you notice a noticeable spike when visiting a particular website that shouldn’t be doing so.
Additionally, if you have closed everything but your CPU usage is still extremely high, you might have a malware issue with crypto mining.
Ad Blockers Can Help
However, there have also been instances where infected website advertisements have also contributed to this CPU pirating. Mining hijacking can happen simply by visiting specific websites. Researchers from the security software provider ESET have described this procedure.
Running an ad blocker can therefore stop this. Additionally, known varieties of in-browser miners can be blocked by ad-blocking software. Coinhive is one such mining script, though it isn’t necessarily malicious software.
In an effort to approach this as lawfully as possible, Coinhive criticized Showtime for using their Javascript without informing users that it would be used for mining.
There is Other Malware
More advanced malware that actively infiltrates the system exists in addition to legal pirate mining software. They are spread via links that open a malicious website or through infected image files.
In the event that you encounter one of these, launch Task Manager, locate the process consuming all those compute cycles, and end it using your resource monitor.
Summary: Pay More Attention
It is still possible to detect a Bitcoin Miner virus. Watch the performance of your device and pay attention to any warning signs. To increase the level of protection on your device, avoid visiting dubious websites and clicking on dubious links in emails, use pop-up blockers, or install browser extensions that prevent crypto mining.
Installing security software can reduce the chance of being exploited, but being watchful and aware of oneself is equally important.
FAQ
How to Detect Crypto Mining Malware?
A high and consistent CPU usage percentage might be a sign of crypto-malware. With Windows Task Manager or Mac’s Activity Monitor, users can view their CPU usage.
How Do You Tell If Your GPU is Being Used for Mining?
It’s easy. You don’t even need any 3rd party programs to check if your GPU is loaded with a compute task, just go into your task manager, click on your GPU, then click on any of the drop-down menus, say on “Copy” or “Video Encode” and click on “Compute_0”. You’re good if the number is 0.
Can Crypto Mining Be Detected?
In the network, cryptocurrency mining can be seen. Automatic detection of mining services is possible with machine learning. A dedicated web application gathers the IP addresses and service status of different mining pool servers.
