It’s a Virus that mines cryptocurrency on your computer!
Soundmixer.exe is a executable that you might find on the task manager hogging up to 100% CPU (even though I did not found it there). It all began when on a wonderful dawn, I had to switch to pc as my macbook pro (Which I used it for almost 3–4 years as my main workstation) had some issues with the charging port and it needed a repair. Yes, I am a Apple fanboy. I like the way Apple got the user experience almost better compared to windows in their product. I had a windows phone. I don’t know, why? but I loved it with all it’s bugs and errors on almost every touch of your finger on the screen, I lost trust in Windows 10. I was hesitant to move to a Windows 10 Pc again but I had no options. Well in just two days I got greeted with a bug some startup bug //typical windows10. Nevermind, coming back to the Soundmixer.exe I wasn’t aware of it’s presence on my machine.
On one fine day when I choose to open command prompt to perform a specific task Well it just blinked and disappeared. At first I thought it was a windows 10 bug again.
Windows 10 had so many error that I kind of counted the error caused by the virus as a bug.
I rebooted it. Usual go to solution and that didn’t help. I switched to Power shell and it was able to execute my required command still wasn’t still happy about it and it’s pale blue background (Maybe there’s trick to change it, I guess). I searched online for solutions, Most of the people had reported similar problems and their recommended fix did not work for me.
It has been almost six months and my command line wasn’t working. I used power shell at times but I did not like it. Then again after those worrisome day I set on a mission to solve the conspiracy of my Command Prompt not starting.
One of the fixes asked me to look into registry and search for soundmixer.
I seemed skeptical but I did it anyway because the rest of the path never really get me to the answer.
The search took some time and there it was soundmixer.exe in my HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
The virus landed via torrents. It is being most commonly found on the Assasin’s Creed torrent. Other ways of it getting into your pc also include cracks/keygens.
It’s a cryptominer (also known as Cryptojacking Malware), a variant of torrent virus.
Symptoms include
- Running SoundMixer.exe at 100% CPU
- Command Prompt Window popping up on PC launch (Faced this)
- System errors
- Inability to install new applications (Faced this)
- Antivirus Program malfunction
Other associated risks include
- Installation of other malware
- System file corruption
To put an end to this
Delete from the registry
- Search on start for Registry Editor
- Go to Edit and then to Find
- search soundmixer
- Right click and delete the file
Note : You can also delete the executable manually (SoundMixer folder located in user/APPDATA/Roaming/Microsoft)
Learn more about Virus here…
Have a safe day!
