Energy.exe process belongs to a coin miner trojan. Several malware strains use this name to disguise themselves in the Task Manager, but coin miners are the most often ones.
Coin miner trojans are the kind of malware that aims at squeezing out a maximum of your PC’s hardware to mine cryptocurrencies. This inevitably leads to serious performance issues, as Energy.exe malware will take up to 80% of your CPU power. In this article, I will explain how did that thing appear, and how to remove the Energy.exe virus from your system.
What is Energy.exe process?
Energy.exe is a malicious process created by coin miner virus
As I have pointed out earlier, Energy.exe is a coin miner trojan. The names of the executive files may be different, but the effects are almost always identical. Since coin miners aim at cryptocurrency mining, they use all possible hardware capacity of your desktop to run this procedure. This virus does not care about the fact that you may need to make use of your desktop for other tasks – it will constantly consume over 80% of your processor power.
Energy.exe – Extremely high CPU and GPU usage
Besides CPU utilization, some of the coin miners additionally make use of GPU power for their operations. In that instance, you will likely struggle also to see the mouse cursor moving – GPU is often used on 100%. It is not as important as a processor for system work, so Energy.exe coin miner viruses don’t waste time on trifles and utilize it all. It sometimes may result in sad results.
Shortly about cryptocurrency mining
List of the typical coin miner symptoms
How dangerous is the Energy.exe miner?
Coin miners do not deal damage to your files. However, they do a lot of unpleasant things with the whole system
First of all, Energy.exe malware makes your PC overloaded. It is unable to run your applications now since all processor power is used by malware. That malware does not care for your wants, all it pays attention to is making money on you. Even if you are patient, and you waited until the browser is open, you will likely struggle with extremely slow performance. Pages can open up for years, and any kind of login will likely take about a minute – just a horror story for a person who does a job online.
Energy.exe Technical Summary.
| File Name | Energy.exe |
| Type | Trojan Coin Miner |
| Detection Name | Trojan:Win32/CoinMiner |
| Distribution Method | Software bundling, Intrusive advertisement, redirects to shady sites, etc. |
| Similar behavior | Apiwindriver.exe, Healthiness.exe, Logrotate.exe |
| Removal | Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware for automatic Energy.exe removal. |
“Visible” damage is not a solitary unpleasant activity coin miners perform on your computer. Energy.exe coin miner also deals damage to your OS. To complete all malicious operations successfully ruins the protection components of your system. You will likely see your Microsoft Defender disabled – malware stops it to prevent recognition. If you open the HOSTS file, you will likely see a ton of new entries – they are brought in by this coin miner to connect your system to a malicious mining network. All these changes shall be thrown back to the initial state in the process of computer recovery.
Hardware effects of coin miner activity
Besides slowing down your computer, performing at peak level for a long period can trigger damage to your machine as well as increase power expenses. Hardware elements are designed to easily get along with high load, but they are good with it only in case when they are in good shape.
Compact and covered CPU fan is hard to damage. Meanwhile, graphic cards have large and easy-to-access rotors, which can be easily broken if touched while running, for instance, by the user much before the coin-miner injection. Malfunctioning cooling system, together with the high load caused by the Energy.exe virus can easily lead to graphic processing unit failure2. Graphic cards also tend to have increased wearing when used for crypto mining. It is likely a bad situation when your GPU’s performance plunges 20-30% just after 1-2 weeks of being exploited in such a way.
How did I get the Energy.exe coin miner virus?
Coin miners are spread through different ways, but their main sources are malicious banners and programs from dubious sources
The example of malicious banners you can see in the Internet
One more way you could get this item on your computer is by downloading it from an unreliable website as a part of a program. Users who spread hacked variants of popular programs (which do not demand the license key) have small chances to get paid. Therefore, there is a huge temptation to add malware to the final package of the hacked app and get a coin for every setup. Before blaming these guys for hacking and also malware distribution, ask yourself – is it OK to avoid purchasing the program in such a way? It is much cheaper to pay $20-$30 at once than to pay a much greater sum for an antivirus program and new parts for your computer.
How to remove the Energy.exe miner from my PC?
The best way to get rid of this coin miner virus is to use anti-malware software
Booting the PC into Safe Mode with Networking
Press the Start button, then choose Power, and click on Reboot while holding the Shift key on the keyboard.
Windows will reboot into recovery mode. In that mode, choose Troubleshoot→ Startup Settings→ Safe Mode with Networking. Press the corresponding button on your keyboard to choose that option.
When your PC is in Safe Mode, all third-party software, just like the majority of non-crucial system components, is not started with the system start. That allows you to clean the PC without dealing with the high CPU usage of the coin miner.
References
- About unwanted effects for GPUs in the process of crypto mining.
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