Another Urban Legend?

Just heard a story. A guy bought a desktop of the most popular PC brand with a most popular PC operating system, a year ago. The OS’s version is that has a very bad reputation, you know. He found a “black process” or processes run on his PC, which has following features:

1. The process does not registered in Task Manager, neither in CPU nor in Memory.

2. It runs regularly every day from around 1:00 am, and stops in next morning. However, every Saturday is bad. It runs until around 1:00 pm, sometime last to 8:00 pm. It does not start or end at exactly same time everyday. You would see this speed makes the PC completely useless.

3. It occupies huge amount of CPU and Memory, which makes a noticeable and considerable slow of response from PC. For instance, Ctrl + Alt + Del may take up to five minutes to enable Task Manager appears. The total RAM is 2G. When black process running and when no other applications opens (just re-started PC), Task Manager shows total 2% being used and around 20% Memory being used, yet, the PC is as slow as any mouse movement can take 2 minutes.

4. Total amount of 50G Hard Disk space could not be accounted for, given the fact of total 110G Hard Disk space has been used including all hidden files and recycle bin. When black process runs, the Hard Disk is flashing. The total Hard Disk space if around 460G for this driver (C:\).

5. Black process running does not require the Internet connection.

6. Black process runs before user logins into OS. Restarting computer, either softly or hardly does not stop its running. It has been noticed Safe Mode could not stop it either.

7. Do not know if it was caused by the black process or system bug, when black process runs, SOMETIMES Ctrl + Alt + Del generate an error message in pop-up window: “Unable to create a security option. Login failed”.

8. It was believed as virus infection. However, he failed to find out if this contention can be confirmed after he tried much anti-virus software.

9. No harm has been noticed apart from the slow response from PC.

10. It has been confirmed this black process is not any of the scheduled system maintenance.

Based on these limited information, it is hard to make conclusion. However, it looks like a system bug or an urban legend – someone is conducting a secret SETI@home like distributed computing scheme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home