I've noticed that more and more people are encountering the problem of hidden mining on their PCs. This is a really serious issue — a virus infiltrates the system and starts using your computer to mine crypto without your knowledge. Moreover, regular antivirus often doesn't help. I decided to figure out how to find a miner on a PC and protect myself.

In general, mining viruses are divided into two types. The first is cryptojacking, embedded directly into a website. When you visit an infected page, the script activates and starts working in the background. The second type is a classic virus in the form of a file or archive, which is installed covertly and runs every time the computer is turned on.

How to tell if you have a problem? Here are the main signs. If your graphics card starts making loud noises and overheating — that’s the first warning. You can check the load with the GPU-Z program. The second sign is that the computer begins to lag, and in the task manager, the CPU is loaded at 60% or higher. The third is that RAM is used up quickly, the browser runs slower than usual. Sometimes you notice that traffic suddenly increases or files disappear on their own.

Now about how to find a miner on a PC. The first step is to run an antivirus and perform a full system scan. After that, it makes sense to use CCleaner or a similar program to clean junk files. But this doesn’t always work because new viruses can add themselves to the list of trusted applications.

For manual search, open the registry: Win+R, type regedit, press OK. Then Ctrl+F and enter the name of a suspicious process. Often, these processes have strange names made of random characters. Find all suspicious entries and delete them.

Another way is to check the Task Scheduler. Press Win+R, type taskschd.msc. In the scheduler library, look at which processes are loaded automatically when the PC starts. Pay attention to the Triggers and Conditions tabs — they show when and how each task is launched. Disable or delete suspicious processes directly from there.

If regular methods didn’t help, try a more serious tool like AnVir Task Manager — it more thoroughly checks startup items. Or Dr. Web, which performs a deep system scan and can find even complex malware.

Regarding protection — a comprehensive approach is needed. Install a clean version of Windows and restore it regularly (every 2-3 months). Keep your antivirus databases updated constantly. Before downloading programs, check their information, and scan all downloaded files with an antivirus. Work with antivirus and firewall enabled.

Don’t forget small but effective measures. Add dangerous sites to the hosts file (lists are available on GitHub). Don’t run programs as an administrator — otherwise, the miner will get full access to resources. Use the secpol.msc utility to restrict execution to trusted programs only. Set a strong password on Windows and your router.

In the browser, block JavaScript in the settings — this removes the possibility of running malicious code online. In Chrome, enable built-in mining protection in the Privacy and Security section. Use extensions like AdBlock or uBlock to filter ads and malware.

How to find a miner on a PC — it’s not just one operation, but a whole strategy. You need to check regularly, not ignore strange system behavior, and stay updated. Viruses constantly evolve, so protection must be multi-layered. If something still gets through — don’t panic, just methodically go through all the check points.