It wasn't a "virus" in the traditional sense. It was a "silent miner" or a stealer bot. It had likely ridden in on the installer he grabbed from IGetIntoPC. While he was using the cracked software to build his career, his computer had been conscripted into a botnet, mining cryptocurrency for someone else and siphoning his session cookies.
Elias knew the drill. He skipped past the ad-fly pages—interstitial labyrinths designed to harvest clicks and expose users to gambling sites and malware. He felt a small pang of guilt, quickly suppressed by the logic of survival. I’ll buy it when I’m rich, he told himself. It was the freelancer’s prayer. igetintopccom