How bitcoin miners work
“The pirates we were meant to be! Trim the sails and roam the sea!”
Ahoy maties! If ye be looking for some pirating to dos, make sure it ain’t be of y’ur favorite games. Anyone with just a day’s experience of pirating will know the risks of catching a digital viral infection when sailing the dangerous seas of free booty, and though most veteran pirates know how to avoid the dangerous mines, some can be caught off-guard.
Such is apparently the case with Watch Dogs torrent, which seems to have fallen ill to the latest hacking trend of Bitcoin mining. Somebody somewhere is eager to mine out some Bitcoins for him/herself, and they have included a dodgy little bug in pirated leaked release of Watch Dogs.
The version in question is a fake SKIDROW copy of the game, with users reporting massively dropped computer performance and a suspicious process found in the task manager called “winlogin.exe”, which could easily be overlooked because of the awful similarity to the authentic Windows process called “winlogon.exe”.
Considering how the torrent scene works that fake torrent may have been repacked and re-uploaded to popular sites already, which may have boosted its delivery exponentially. As a matter of fact, one of the re-uploader confessed such on the popular torrent site:
The symptoms that a computer can suffer from this Bitcoin mining malware include Blue Screen of Death, additional power consumption, excessive system utility usage, and random restarts.
Unlucky who wished to keep their cash in their pockets or couldn’t wait for a couple of days are in for some serious ‘hard-to-detect malware invasion.
Our first advice would obviously be to buy a retail copy, but if you’re one of those misfortunate people who just happen to get the virus one way or the other (hey, I won’t judge you), update your anti-virus/anti-spyware with the latest definitions and run a complete scan of your computer to get rid of the Bitcoin-miner.
Or just go to the files location and try deleting them, not sure if it would work!
Watch Dogs still has two days left in its release, and you have the chance to redeem yourself and buy the game even now. See you on 27th May, hopefully with your PC intact.