Loading…
33
Old laptop woke up to a crypto miner after a year offline
Honestly, I fired up my old 2013 Dell last week to grab some files and noticed the fan was screaming. Turns out some mining script was buried in a startup folder, probably from a cracked game I downloaded years ago. I wiped the whole drive and reinstalled Windows, but it took a full afternoon to back up my photos first. The scary part is I kept that thing unplugged for 12 months and the payload still triggered on boot. Has anyone else seen dormant malware wake up like that, or am I just unlucky?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
thomas_young18d ago
That 12 month gap is what gets me. Most malware authors code for quick payouts, they want their stuff running while it's hot, not waiting around like some digital time bomb. But I've seen this exact trick before with older stuff that uses scheduled tasks or registry run keys that survive reboots, they just sit there patient as a spider until the machine powers up again. The cracked game angle makes total sense too, those repack installers from random forums were notorious for bundling miners that would pause themselves if they detected any monitoring tools or if the system went idle for too long. You probably had it running quiet for months before you even noticed, just throttling your CPU whenever you weren't actively clicking around. Good call on the full wipe though, some of those scripts would reinstall themselves from a hidden recovery partition if you only did a factory reset.
3