That free antivirus was secretly using my CPU for crypto mining

Checked task manager last Tuesday and my PC was pegged at 90% usage doing nothing. Took me two hours to trace it to some free "optimizer" tool I downloaded from a blog. Uninstalled it and swapped over to the built in Windows Defender with uBlock Origin, night and day difference. Anyone else found shady stuff hiding inside free security tools?

3 comments

3 Comments

price.ben16d ago

Come on, you're getting worked up over nothing. Free apps gotta make money somehow, and mining is way less shady than selling your data to advertisers or installing adware. At least with mining you're theoretically getting some value back instead of just being a product. Plus if you're not paying for the software, you're the product anyway. This is just a more transparent version of the same deal.

ivan77415d ago

My cousin's gaming PC got turned into a literal space heater that way.

riverh4914d ago

Yeah that's a fair point price.ben, but it's not quite that simple. The electricity cost from mining usually ends up way higher than any coins you'd earn, especially on a mid-range card like your cousin's. @ivan774's story is pretty common from what I've seen online - those mining apps don't throttle based on your electric rates or hardware limits. Most of these free apps aren't exactly transparent about how much power they're pulling either, so you might think you're getting a deal but really you're just burning cash on your bill.