Epicscale

Overview

Adware:Win32/Epicscale is a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) that operates as a covert cryptocurrency miner. While it originally presented itself as a platform that used 'idle processing power' for charitable causes, it is widely classified as adware/riskware due to its deceptive installation practices (often bundled with other software without clear consent) and the severe impact it has on system performance.

Understanding Epicscale (Cryptojacking)
To an end-user, an Epicscale infection manifests as severe system sluggishness. Fans may run at maximum speed, laptops will overheat, and battery life will plummet, even when the computer is ostensibly idle. For a security administrator, Epicscale is a form of Resource Hijacking (`T1496`). It steals the organization's hardware resources and electricity to mine cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin or Monero) for the software developers.

Execution and Hijacking Mechanics
Epicscale is typically distributed via software bundles (`T1189`). When a user downloads a free utility (like uTorrent, which notoriously bundled Epicscale in 2015), Epicscale installs silently in the background. It establishes persistence via the Registry Run keys or Scheduled Tasks (`T1547.001`) to ensure it launches automatically. Once running, it utilizes the CPU and sometimes the GPU to perform complex cryptographic hashing, communicating with external mining pools (`T1105`) to submit completed 'shares' and receive new workloads.

Indicators of Compromise & Impact
The primary impact is severe performance degradation and potential hardware damage due to overheating. Host-based IoCs include prolonged, 100% CPU utilization by unknown or unexpected processes (often disguised with generic names). The presence of the Epicscale application in `C:\Program Files` or `%AppData%` is a definitive indicator. Network IoCs include constant, low-bandwidth outbound traffic (often TCP over non-standard ports like 3333 or 14444) communicating with known cryptocurrency mining pools (e.g., Stratum protocol).

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

Observed techniques used by this family, mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework:

Generated Detections (Boilerplate)

These YARA and Sigma rules are auto-generated based on the family name and aliases. They must be heavily tuned before deployment in a production environment.

YARA Rule

rule MALWARE_WIN_EPICSCALE {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Epicscale (advanced_threat)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "epicscale" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Epicscale Activity
id: 220b05c3d0131d08b5ae7d73e0599783
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the epicscale malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*epicscale*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

Containment & Response Steps

Ordered checklist for responders. Adapt to your environment and engage professional support for active incidents.

1. Use the Windows Task Manager or EDR tools to identify the process consuming excessive CPU resources and terminate it immediately.
2. Use the Windows Control Panel to thoroughly uninstall the 'Epicscale' application and the parent program that bundled it.
3. Run a full scan with a reputable antimalware tool to ensure all associated scheduled tasks and hidden mining components are removed.
4. Update network firewall rules to block outbound traffic to known cryptocurrency mining pools (Stratum protocol).

What to Avoid

Common mistakes during response to this family that can destroy evidence, spread the infection, or worsen recovery.

1. Do not ignore complaints of slow or overheating computers; it is often the first indicator of a cryptojacking infection.
2. Avoid allowing users to download unverified freeware or torrent clients, as these are the primary distribution vectors for bundled miners.

References & External Analysis

• Search "epicscale" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: advanced_threat)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Babylon
• Wpepro
• Playgames
• Opriupdater
• Gamebox

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordan123234-malware-families-explorer.static.hf.space/api/epicscale.json

Ecosystem & Interactive Environments

This profile is part of the Malware Families Catalog, a public dataset of 2,899 malware families. The catalog is also published across our ecosystem: Hugging Face, Kaggle, Zenodo, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.