Nowadays there are tons of Android emulators for PC, but a huge scandal has just been uncovered related to one of the most well-known emulators: a Reddit user has discovered that the program Andy installs a bitcoin miner without your consent that uses your GPU in the background. As far as we’re concerned, until they get rid of the miner and officially confirm the change, you should uninstall it and try out any of the many interesting alternatives that exist.
In this article the writer explains in detail how this problem has been followed up. Some users have tried to contact the official support for Andy, but the response they’ve received is getting their accusations deleted and getting banned. If there were any doubt, the files in question aren’t part of the installer (a pretty common technique when it comes to adware on Windows), but instead form part of the Andy software. In other words, it’s not just a chance encounter…it’s completely intentional.
The offending process, hidden behind the name updater.exe (VirusTotal detects it as unsafe), stays in the system even if you uninstall Andy, so you need to complete the following process to get rid of it completely. This is also posted in the aforementioned Reddit thread:
- Close any process related to Andy from the task manager
- Uninstall Andy through the Windows assistant
- Search for the process called “Updater”
- Right click on it and click go to details
- Right click on Updater.exe in details and click end process tree
- Access from the file explorer C:\Program Files (x86)
- Click once on the folder Updater and press Shift+Delete
- Click once on the folder AndyOS and press Shift+Delete
- Check in the task manager that no services related to Andy are still running
- Download the tool Malwarebytes and run a complete scan.
- Download CCleaner and do a registry fix. Delete anything related to Andy.
The main problem here is that we were tricked into downloading a cryptominer, because beyond that, it’s extremely easy to find an alternative among the enormous variety of tools that exist. While we can always count on classics like Bluestacks or NOX, there are other equally valid options that even come with some unique features like LDPlayer.
