Last Updated on January 17, 2023 by Mathew Diekhake
We have been getting some questions regarding whether or not pskill.exe is a virus. And the results of what we found were quite interesting.
Firstly, Microsoft does have a program called PsKill. It’s a kill utility and it shows as pskill.exe in the Task Manager. PsKill can be a kill utility like what you find in Resource Kit as well as a program that can terminate remote processes. However, the original kill utility and Resource Kit was developed for Windows NT/2000 which is a long time ago compared to today. You can find PsKill in PsTools.
So if you have a process called pskill.exe running in the Task Manager on a modern Windows operating system version such as Windows 10 or 11 it would seem suspicious but not necessarily a virus.
I then did more research to check what other sites were saying that I have come to trust. One of them (with an article authored by Alice Woods) suggests that pskill.exe is used today by Trojan:Win32/Egghead. That doesn’t mean that the pskill.exe you see on your computer is a Trojan but just that according to Alice Woods a Trojan is using a process with the same name.
In conclusion, if you notice the pskill.exe on your modern Windows operating system and you haven’t run the PsTools program, the pskill.exe process is officially suspicious and you should run an antimalware scan with a program such as Spybot Search & Destroy. If the antimalware scan doesn’t remove it, don’t panic. At that point, I would assume it’s part of Windows but there is no more info on it.