Office.exe process belongs to a malevolent program that can properly be recognized as a coin miner trojan virus. That malware form utilizes your PC components to mine cryptocurrencies, generally – Monero or DarkCoin1. It makes your system roughly unfunctional because of high CPU use.
What is Office.exe process?
Office.exe is a malicious process created by coin miner virus
Office.exe – Extremely high CPU and GPU use
Besides CPU utilization, some of the coin miners additionally make use of GPU power for their tasks. In that case, you will struggle also to see the mouse arrow moving – GPU is often utilized on 100%. It is not as critical as processor for system work, so Office.exe coin miner viruses don’t waste time on trifles and utilize all of it. It sometimes may lead to bad consequences.
Shortly about cryptocurrency mining
List of the typical coin miner symptoms
How dangerous is the Office.exe miner?
Coin miners does not deal damage to your files. However, they make a lot of unpleasant things with the whole system
Initially, Office.exe malware makes your computer overloaded. It is unable to run your applications now, as all CPU power is consumed by a virus. That malware does not care for your demands, all it focuses on is generating profits on you. Even if you are patient, and you waited until browser is open, you will likely suffer from extremely slow efficiency. Pages will open for years, any sort of logins will take about a minute – just a nightmare for a person who does a job online.
Office.exe Technical Summary.
| File Name | Office.exe |
| Type | Trojan Coin Miner |
| Detection Name | Trojan:Win32/CoinMiner |
| Distribution Method | Software bundling, Intrusive advertisement, redirects to shady sites etc. |
| Similar behavior | Dqltxp.exe, Svcupdater.exe, Igvfsz.exe |
| Removal | Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware for automatic Office.exe removal. |
“Visible” damage is not a solitary bad activity coin miners do to your PC. Office.exe coin miner additionally deals damage to your operating system. To conduct all malevolent functions successfully, it ruins the protection features of your system. You will likely see your Microsoft Defender disabled – malware halts it to avoid recognition. If you check the HOSTS file, you will likely see a ton of new entries – they are added by this trojan miner to connect your PC to a malicious cryptomining network. All these adjustments shall be thrown back to the initial state in the process of computer recovery.
Hardware effects of coin miner activity
Besides decreasing your system’s performance, performing at peak level for long times can cause damage to your device and increase power expenses. Hardware elements are designed to easily get along with high load, but they can do so only when they are in a good shape.
Tiny and well-protected CPU cooling system is quite hard to crack. Meanwhile, GPUs have big and easy-to-access rotors, which can be easily cracked if touched while working, for example, by the user much before the virus injection. Malfunctioning cooling system, together with the extremely high load caused by Office.exe malware can easily lead to graphic processing unit failure3. Graphic cards are also tend to have very fast wearing when used for cryptocurrency mining. It is likely a bad case when your GPU’s performance decreases on 20-30% only after 1-2 weeks of being used in such a way.
How did I get Office.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
An additional way you could get this item on your PC is by downloading it from the dubious web page 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. For this reason, there is a huge temptation to add in malware to the final package of the hacked app and get a coin for each installation. Prior to blaming these individuals for hacking and malware distribution, ask yourself – is it okay to avoid purchasing the program in such a way? It is much cheaper to pay $20-$30 at once than to pay a much bigger figure for antivirus program and new parts for your computer.
How to remove the Office.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, just like the majority of non-critical operating system components, are not started with the system start. That allows you to clean the system without dealing with high CPU 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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