How to Get Rid of BitMiner Malware
How to Get Rid of BitMiner Malware
Hello everyone, I've observed a significant boost in game performance lately—often exceeding 50%—when I open Task Manager. After researching the cause, I followed some suggestions and ran Malwarebytes. The scan revealed a coin miner that I isolated by quarantining the files and removing them with Malwarebytes. After restarting, those threats disappeared and no longer appeared in scans. Despite this, my system still felt sluggish. Using System Informer helped me see the issue: three instances of cmd.exe were running, heavily using CPU resources, especially when Task Manager was active. I was able to end those processes via System Informer, which restored performance as if Task Manager was open. I also checked GPU usage with HWMonitor but didn’t see any activity. It seems my system is still affected or has residual malware. So far, I've tried Malwarebytes and Hitman Pro. Any advice on completely removing this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Your specs: Intel Core i9-10900K, RTX 4080, 64GB DDR4, NVMe SSDs, HDDs, Windows 11.
Welcome to the forums! You have been pwned. Nuke that thing from orbit. Full wipe and reinstall at the very least. Also scan every device you share a home network with and if they are compromised as well, nuke them. Finally, change passwords on everything important (google, anything to do with money, social media, etc.) If possible, try to figure out when this compromise happened and how it happened. Take it as a learning experience
Numerous malicious software aren't removed by basic disk formatting or partition deletions, often requiring a complete Secure Erase process.
Successfully fixed the issue, thanks! I attempted Bitdefender, Rkill, and RogueKiller. They located and removed the malicious .exe files—AppSecure and Kernal2. After restarting, the processes stopped working and my PC's performance improved without needing Task Manager. Appreciate the help! I'll stay more alert and monitor things to ensure everything is resolved. I prefer not to reinstall unless necessary, but I'm open to trying it if needed.
Doesn't matter. There is ZERO guarantee that there aren't latent back doors nor other undetected compromises. I know it sucks, but you really should re install windows. Compromised computers don't just put you at risk, but also can easily be used to harm others. Taking this seriously is a moral responsibility. While true, they are uncommon and thus rather valuable and thus unlikely to be deployed to a rando Personally, I'd take some screen shots of what I need off the PC, then pull and destroy the drive, might even reflash the GPU VBIOS. But not everyone can afford to do that