A friend of mine complained to me about his computer going really slow as of late. Which honestly I don't think much of as any system over time get cluttered and littered with garbage that slows down the operating system. However what surprised me in the hours to follow was that his system was actually mining bitcoin for someone else without him even knowing!

What really stinks about this is that your system could be mining and sucking up huge amounts of power it would not be otherwise. If you have 2 graphics cards and a high end CPU you could be looking at a solid 500 + watts of extra power being used when your system is on and running because of this.

I wanted to create one of the most simplest ways to try and detect if maybe your system has become a victim of this and this is what I have come up with.

If you are running windows like most are and most that would be infected with such a "virus" then the most easy way to check for this is by seeing when your CPU and perhaps GPU useage is at over a given period of time.

Steps

1. Press the windows key on your keyboard plus R
2. On the prompt to run type in msconfig
3. On the new window click on the startup tab
4. Click on Open Task Manager
5. Click on the Performance Tab

Now depending on what you are currently running and how good your system is your CPU usage should be 20% or less in most cases. If your browsing the web and looking at any videos etc or even when you first start up your system and everything has loaded you should be around 5% or less. If your seeing your CPU usage at a high level that is steady all the time you could possibly be infected. You can review the processes tab as well to see what current processes are running and see if one is at a constant high that looks unfamiliar to you.

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