Phantom processes

My laptop has stopped being mine.

I opened task manager tonight and saw processes I’d never installed. No names, just strings of numbers — like placeholders someone forgot to rename. When I tried to kill them, they flickered out… and then respawned instantly, stronger. CPU spiked, memory bled away, then reappeared as if nothing happened.

Pulling the Ethernet cable did nothing. The phantom processes ran happily without a connection. Cutting the power should’ve stopped them, but when I booted back up, they were waiting.

I’ve started writing my own monitoring scripts, logging everything to encrypted drives disconnected from the net. If they want to piggyback on my machine, I’ll make sure to leave them some bait. Maybe I can catch what they’re really doing.

Log from tonight:

[03/09/2021 22:14:07]  
PID: 440192  
CPU: 37%  
MEM: 142MB  
Parent: <none>  
Status: UNK / respawned 

If this entry disappears from the blog, I’ll know they’re already inside.