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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

My recurring issue (on a variety of laptops, both Linux and Windows): the fans will start going full-blast, everything slows down, then as soon as I open a task manager CPU usage drops from 100% to something negligible.

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You my friend, most likely have mining malware on your systems. They’ll shutdown when they detect task manager is opened so you don’t notice them.

That was my thought too; one way to get another data point is to just run the task manager as soon as you boot and let it stay there. If the fan behavior NEVER comes back while doing that, another point in the "mining malware" favor (though of course, not definitive).

Though he did say a VAREITY of laptops, both Windows and Linux. Can someone be _that_ unlucky?

or possibly the malware has spread to multiple of their devices?

Always possible; I haven't seen any legit mining malware in a long time. Mostly because it's so easy to spot with the CPU issue, and that CPU based mining even on someone else's machine isn't worth the trouble any more. But perhaps my circle/context is not that of a lot of people.

If it was malware I'd expect it to happen more often; it's usually when I do have a lot of thing going on (browser tabs, VSCode sessions), so I spark up the task manager to work out the problem process, but CPU usage drops before I can investigate.

Plus I'd be surprised if I got the same thing on both linux and windows

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