For those who are wondering, yes, Wine is malware compatible so be careful about the EXEs you run!
I sometimes leave my laptop on, but the monitor turned off when I go to sleep. Sometimes when I wake up, the fans on the laptop will be running full speed, which dies down soon after I turn the monitor on and use the laptop for a little while. Do you think this might be a symptom of some covertware running on my laptop?
Perhaps.
There may be easier ways to test for this, but what comes to mind is if you install your current OS again on another partition and then leave it as you usually do, and see if the fans do the same thing. If they do, it might just be a fault with the fan control or sleep state or something.
If it doesn’t happen, I’d assume something fishy is going on. Maybe try and set up a script to log your CPU usage and what’s using the most every few minutes. That might catch something?
I’ve just now had another thought. If it’s trying to be covert, maybe just leave your task manager / htop open and don’t touch anything for a while, it might think you’re afk and start running again. If it doesn’t, it could be checking to see if common monitoring tools are running and stopping itself to avoid detection, if that’s the case you’ll have to be a bit smarter about trying to catch it.
tl;dr Maybe. Run a virus scan if you can, or try and find it yourself if you think you can. If all else fails, nuke the OS and start again.
