suspicious cyber activity

[darkoshi]

Do you ever get the feeling that your computer is doing something and trying to hide it from you, even though you are rather sure it isn't infected with malware?

There are times (both on this laptop and my old one, and my work one) where I hear the fan start spinning loudly, even though I haven't been doing anything that should take much processing power.

Then I open Task Manager, and click to see what process is using the most CPU (showing all processes). But then either
...the fan continues spinning loudly for a little while, even though according to Task Mgr the CPU is 95% or more idle
or
...the fan abruptly goes quiet as if it stopped doing whatever it was doing, so that I wouldn't see it listed in Task Mgr.

Comments

Re: All The Time

[darkoshi]

Mine isn't usually right after booting (though that did happen more often on the old laptop). Sometimes it's after I've left the laptop idle for a while, where I can imagine it would choose to use that time for some background scan or update activity. In those cases, it could explain why the fan slows down when I click to find out what is making the noise (as it notices the laptop is no longer idle), but other times it happens while I'm using it, but not doing anything intensive. What bothers me the most is not being able to see which process is using the CPU enough to generate so much heat that the fan needs to spin. That's what makes it suspicious; that I can't track it in Task Manager. It always stops soon after I try looking into it, so I don't have time to open other utilities like Process Manager, etc.

On my work laptop, a lot of time when the fan starts getting loud, I can check Task Manager and can see that it is one of the automatic update services which is doing a lot of processing. Then I'm not as bothered by it. But when I don't see any processes using much CPU, that's when it seems very suspicious, as if something is running in stealth mode.