Soundrec.exe

Soundrec.exe is the name of a malware that belongs to the category of harmful mining software. Miners are programs that make their way on the victim's system quietly, then put significant strain on the device's hardware, mining cryptocurrency for the bad actors behind them, without the victim's consent.

Soundrec.exe is often encountered in free software bundles, where it can slip into a victim's system without explicit consent, either hidden behind a wall of text and checkboxes in the install wizard or completely undisclosed. Once it finds its way on a hard drive, Soundrec.exe usually plants itself in the C:\ProgramData directory. The process that does the mining shows up as "Soundrec.exe *32" or "Soundrec.exe (32 bit)" in the Windows Task Manager, depending on whether you're running Windows 7 or Windows 10. Once the miner is deployed, the system will start behaving strangely almost immediately.

The most visible signs of the miner's activity are a general slowdown, window minimize-maximize animations lagging, copy-paste operations taking unusually long to complete, to name a few. If you open the Task Manager's performance tab with Soundrec.exe running, you also will notice an unusually high CPU load across all cores, even with the system idle on the desktop. A graphics card monitor also may show increased fan and memory usage of your GPU. Playing any games or running resource-intensive software also may be nearly impossible, because the miner is using up such a large chunk of the hardware's capacity.

When it comes to miners like Soundrec.exe, the best defense would always be to keep a fully-featured security suite installed, which can monitor the hard drive activity and file traffic from the Web and catch similar threats before they are deployed on your hard drive.