Bootstrapper. Exe Virus ⛏️ (Coin Miner Trojan) Removal

What is Bootstrapper.exe process?

As I have specified in the introduction, Bootstrapper.exe is a coin miner trojan. The names of the executive file may be diverse, however, the consequences are almost always the same. Because coin miners aim at cryptocurrency mining, they utilize all available hardware power of your personal computer to perform this procedure. This malware doesn’t pay attention to the fact that you probably want to use your system for other tasks – it will continuously take over 80% of your processor power.

Besides CPU usage, some of the coin miners additionally make use of GPU power for their tasks. In that situation, you will struggle also to see the mouse arrow moving – GPU is often used on 100%. It is not as crucial as CPU for system work, so Bootstrapper.exe coin miner viruses do not waste time on trifles and use all of it. It sometimes can result in sad effects.

Crypto mining means the activity of calculating the transaction block hash. That is a basic element of any project based on the blockchain technology. Since this action takes a lot of calculations, a high-end machine is needed. Exactly, the graphic card is better for this task, because they have more cores available. Cryptocurrency mining farms are usually constructed of tens and hundreds of graphic cards to complete their task efficiently. Such systems are not usable for “general” purposes, like gaming or browsing the Web. Crooks who gain money via this coin miner use someones’ PCs instead, even if they are used for the regular activity.²

List of the typical coin miner symptoms

How dangerous is the Bootstrapper.exe miner?

First of all, Bootstrapper.exe malware makes your system overloaded. It is not able to run your applications anymore, as all processor power is consumed by a malware. That malware does not care for your wants, all it focuses on is making money on you. Even if you are patient, and you waited until browser is open, you will likely suffer from extremely sluggish performance. Pages can open up for years, any type of logins will take about a minute – just a headache for a person that works online.

Bootstrapper.exe Technical Summary.

“Visible” harm is not a solitary bad thing coin miners do to your personal computer. Bootstrapper.exe coin miner additionally deals damage to your OS. To carry out all malicious functions correctly, it ruins the security components of your system. You will likely see your Microsoft Defender disabled – malware halts it to avoid detection. 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 computer to a malicious cryptomining network. All these changes shall be gone back to the initial state in the process of system recovery.

Hardware effects of coin miner activity

Besides slowing down your PC, performing at peak power for a long period of time can trigger damage to your machine and raise power bills. PC components are created to easily deal with high load, but they are good with it only when they are in a good shape.

Small and well-protected processor fan is not very easy to damage. Meanwhile, graphic cards have big and easy-to-access fans, which can be easily broke if affected while running, for example, by the user much earlier before the virus injection. Malfunctioning cooling system, together with the extremely high load caused by Bootstrapper.exe miner can easily lead to GPU failure³. Graphic cards are also tend to have fast 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.