Tag Archives: starthelp.exe

DGen.exe 100% CPU Usage? – Bitcoin Miner Removal

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Do you see a process named dgen.exe running at 99% or even 100% CPU usage? If that is the case someone is mining Bitcoins on your machine!

dgen.exe high cpu usage in the task manager

The dgen.exe Bitcoin miner has been around for some time. I first spotted it about a month ago, but for some reason I chose not to blog about it at that time. However, today I found it again, bundled with another download, so I thought I should post about it after all. Many of the anti-virus programs detect it as you can see in the scan result from VirusTotal:

dgen.exe virus total scan

How did you get dgen.exe on your machine? Please share by posting a comment.

To remove the dgen.exe bitcoin miner you can check the dgen.exe process and the starthelp.exe service for removal in FreeFixer. This will also fix the high CPU usage that you probably see on your machine.

dgen.exe-process

The starthelp.exe service appear as “Protect Monitor”:

starthelp.exe service called "ProtectMonitor" or "Protect Monitor".

Here’s a video where I show FreeFixer in action while removing dgen.exe and starthelp.exe:

Hope you found this useful. Thank you for watching!

Update 2014-08-11: I’ve seen a few cases where other filenames appear in the “c:\Program Files\PCDapp”  folder:

  • cudaminer.exe