Sunday, March 15, 2020

Fitgirl Assassins Creed Origins install bitcoin miner causing high cpu usage when Task Manager is not running

Hello,I downloaded Assasins creed origins today from this site: fitgirl-repacks dot site And something feels odd when I exit the game, my CPU is running at roughly 60%, and as soon as I open task manager it would go back to normal. I ran malwarebytes and it found 2 suspicious items and removed them, but the problem continue, so I started to investigate manually. So I start up Performance Monitor and check which process would shoot up as soon as I close Task Manager. This is what I found. SoundModule. I open up Task Manager, and found 2 running process of this, I open their location and found them at AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoundModule.

I quickly look these up, they do not belong to microsoft and won't trigger any antivirus or malwarebytes, I killed those process and deleted them which solved the problem for me. Hopefully this post will help someone in the future.

For more details regarding this "SoundModule" https://www.anti-malware.name/removal-guide/remove-soundmodule-exe/

I started the game again after that and the "soundmodule" executable or process did not get recreated.

If you pirate a game, make sure you check on your CPU usage to see if there is an suspicious thing going on. In my case, I only realized that something is running on my cpu due to CoreTemp, because I would see the temperature be at 60 to 70 degree Celsius, while my normal idle temp is usually only at 40 to 60, and as soon as I start Task manager, the temperature did drop back to 40ish.

https://preview.redd.it/p0tdcjf4vpm41.png?width=1576&format=png&auto=webp&s=f20dfabcc39a685e86e66ee4a9fc33604396de4d

I have ran the script to verify bins a few times before installing cause it didnt seem to do anything to me. Installed the game and had the cpu issue.

P.S. If you don't trust me, that is fine. This post is not for you. I am not here to convince you or trash fitgirl. We are all pirates here, we are all stealing in someway. This post is mainly for someone else that may have this problem in the future.

If anyone have similar issue, and don't know how to find the bitcoin miner in their pc, do not be shy to private message me, I am happy to help. It is very easy for developers to scan for running process and stop work while a given process is opened, thus the miners process will continue to evolve to hide under more and more programs, so it will become very difficult at some point.



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