Even if you’ve switched to another torrent client (or just an older version of uTorrent), now’s the time to make sure there are no hidden Bitcoin miners hogging your idle system resources. You’ll have to dive into your registry and file system, but a little effort is worth the peace of mind.
Before doing anything, check to see if EpicScale is actually running, as gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann points out. The simplest way to do this is to just fire up Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), click the “Processes” tab and look for “EpicScale.exe”.
If you do find it hanging around, Brinkmann provides the steps to clean your system out, starting with killing the process (or processes), removing it from the registry and start-up sequence and finally, deleting the files themselves.
What I found surprising is that the miner installs itself to the ProgramData folder, a global directory that can be accessed by any user, rather than Program Files. The former path is usually reserved for settings and cache files — not executables. So yes, not a good sign.
I’m sure a removal tool will be cooked up by someone soon, but until then, gHacks’ guide has all the information you need to clean it up.
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