Gplyra Miner

Posted by Lisa Blanc on June 13, 2016

What is Gplyra Miner?

Gplyra Miner is a program you get by installing suspicious software bundles. It is designed to use your computer's resources secretly for mining digital currencies. Removing this application is recommended because it will impact your PC’s performance significantly. Furthermore, the added stress of the mining process will force the Central Processing unit (CPU) to generate more heat and use more power. Unknown cyber crooks have made this program to make money for them — not you, so this program is useless as far as you are concerned. Therefore, we have classified Gplyra Miner as a potentially unwanted program.

Where does Gplyra Miner come from?

Unfortunately, this program’s developers are still unknown, but one thing is for sure — this application was not published by a legitimate software developer. Our malware analysts at Anti-spyware-101.com have discovered that this application is distributed via shady software bundles that drop this application without your knowledge. It is bundled with free software in particular and put up for download on questionable software distributing websites. Researchers say that the installers this undesirable program comes with might allow you to uncheck its installation from the advanced installation settings menu. On a side note, you should check a free program’s license agreement for statements saying that that application will install third-party software. That way you can avoid accidentally installing undesirable applications such as adware, browser hijackers, and potentially unwanted programs.

How does Gplyra Miner work?

We are not saying that Gplyra Miner is malicious per se, but there are several factors we have taken into account when classifying it. As you know, this application is set to install on your PC without your direct authorization and the reason for this being is its unwelcome functionality. Our researchers say that it utilizes approximately 30 % of your CPU’s processing power for mining cryptocurrencies that use the CryptoNight hashing algorithm. While running, this application will read the instructions from a configuration file named cpuminer-conf.json that contains instructions it will use to mine cryptocurrencies. also, it will connect to a mining pool at poolminers.net using the username miner.

30 % is a significant amount of processing power that is wasted on an activity that is of no use to you. Prolonged sessions with this program running in the background in addition to other running programs will force the CPU to generate more heat, and if that heat is not ventilated, then the system will start to overheat and cause your computer’s safety features to kick in. As a result your computer will restart, but Gplyra Miner will launch on system start up again.

Researchers say that this application is set to launch automatically on system start up because it creates a registry key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run named cpuminer. In addition, it creates another key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\cpuminer. This particular key is supposed to allow you to uninstall it via Control Panel, but it does not work. So you have to delete its executable named CPM.exe from its file directory at %APPDATA%\cpuminer manually.

Interestingly, Gplyra Miner will not install on your computer, if you have an anti-virus or anti-malware program installed on it. This is very good news for those users that have such programs on their machines, and it is evident that this application’s developers have configured it not to install to avoid unnecessary attention. In any case, such applications can remove it, so there is no point in installing this program in the first place.

How to remove Gplyra Miner

However, if you do not have an anti-malware program, then this application can easily enter your computer and drain its resources without your knowledge. Therefore, you must remove it manually, and you can do this by following our step-by-step instructions that we have included at the end of this description. Keep in mind that allowing this program to remain on your PC will degrade its performance and cause it to use more electricity and generate more heat. Also, under constant heavy load, your CPU’s life may be reduced.

Removal instructions

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc keys to open the Task Manager.
Select Processes and locate CPM.exe.
Right-click on it and click End process.
Then press Windows+E keys to open the Explorer window.
Enter %APPDATA%\cpuminer and delete all files.
Empty the Recycle bin.

Delete the registry key

Press Windows+R keys.
Enter regedit in the dialog box.
Click OK.
In the Registry Editor, go HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Find the string named cpuminer and delete it.
Then, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Delete the subkey named cpuminer.