Ground.exe process comes from a harmful application that can accurately be identified as a coin miner trojan virus. That malware form utilizes your PC components to mine cryptocurrencies, generally – Monero or DarkCoin1. It makes your personal computer almost nonfunctional due to high CPU use.
What is Ground.exe process?
Ground.exe is a malicious process created by coin miner virus
Ground.exe – Extremely high CPU as well as GPU use
Besides CPU utilization, some of the coin miners additionally make use of GPU power for their operations. In that case, you will struggle even to see the mouse arrow moving – GPU is often used on 100%. It is not as vital as CPU for system work, so Ground.exe coin miner viruses do not waste time on trifles and utilize it all. It often may result in sad consequences.
Shortly about cryptocurrency mining
List of the typical coin miner symptoms
How dangerous is the Ground.exe miner?
Coin miners does not deal damage to your files. However, they make a lot of unpleasant things with the whole system
First of all, Ground.exe malware makes your system overloaded. It is not able to run your applications anymore, as all processor power is consumed by a virus. That malware does not care for your demands, all it pays attention to is generating profits on you. Even if you are patient, and you waited until web browser is open, you will likely suffer from exceptionally slow performance. Pages can open up for years, any sort of logins will likely take about a minute – just a nightmare for a person who does a job online.
Ground.exe Technical Summary.
| File Name | Ground.exe |
| Type | Trojan Coin Miner |
| Detection Name | Trojan:Win32/CoinMiner |
| Distribution Method | Software bundling, Intrusive advertisement, redirects to shady sites etc. |
| Similar behavior | Adasdasdae.exe, Energy.exe, Apiwindriver.exe |
| Removal | Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware for automatic Ground.exe removal. |
“Visible” damage is not a solitary unpleasant thing coin miners perform to your PC. Ground.exe coin miner also deals damage to your OS. To carry out all malevolent operations correctly, it ruins the protection mechanisms of your system. You will likely see your Microsoft Defender disabled – malware halts it to prevent recognition. If you open the HOSTS file, you will likely see a ton of new notes – they are brought in by this trojan miner to connect your computer to a malicious mining network. All these adjustments are about to be gone back to the original in the process of system recovery.
Hardware effects of coin miner activity
Besides slowing down your PC, running at peak power for long times may cause damage to your device and raise power expenses. Hardware elements are created to easily get along with high load, but they can do so only in case when they are in a good shape.
Small and well-protected processor cooling system is quite hard to crack. Meanwhile, GPUs have big and easy-to-access rotors, which can be easily broke if affected while working, for example, by the user much before the virus injection. Malfunctioning cooling system, together with the very high load caused by Ground.exe malware can easily lead to graphic card failure3. Video cards are also tend to have increased wearing when utilized for cryptocurrency mining. It is surely an undesirable situation when your GPU’s performance decreases on 20-30% only after several weeks of being used in such a way.
How did I get Ground.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
Another way you could get this item on your PC is by downloading it from the untrustworthy site as a part of a program. People that spread hacked variants of well-known programs (which do not demand the license key) have small chances to get paid. Hence, there is a very big temptation to add malware to the final package of the hacked application and acquire a coin for every setup. Prior to blaming these individuals for hacking and malware distribution, ask yourself – is it OK to avoid purchasing the program in such a way? It is much cheaper to pay $20-$30 one time than to pay a much bigger figure for antivirus program and new parts for your PC.
How to remove the Ground.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 computer is in Safe Mode, all third-party software, along with the majority of non-critical operating system components, are not launched with the system start. That gives you the ability to clean the PC without dealing with high processor usage of the coin miner.
References
- Read about why Monero and DarkCoin are so popular amongst cybercriminals.
- About unwanted effects for GPUs in the process of cryptomining.
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