NortonLifeLock antivirus Norton 360 and Avira mine cryptocurrencies on computers without notifying users about it.
What is known
It should be noted right away that the developers officially announced the feature of mining Ethereum cryptocurrency using the power of a computer. This requires a PC with NVIDIA or AMD graphics accelerators and 6GB of video memory.
NortonLifeLock does not specify what commission Avira antivirus charges for cryptocurrency mining. In the case of Norton 360, we are talking about 15% of total revenue. And this is much higher compared to the reported percentages of mining pool operators.
But the criticism from the developers was not caused by the possibility of mining digital currency, and not by the high commission. As it turned out, both antiviruses start the miner by default and without warning.
This was confirmed by journalists at The Verge, who discovered that Norton 360 does not receive any notification about the launch of the NCrypt.exe utility. NortonLifeLock said that the NCrypt.exe file can be deleted, but to do this, you must disable the protection against unauthorized access.
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