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.
Three weeks later, Elias’s computer started acting strange. His mouse cursor would drift to the corner of the screen on its own. His GPU fan would spin up to 100% in the middle of the night while the computer was idle. igetintopccom