Norton users can mine Ethereum without having to disable antivirus protection

[Shawn Knight]

In a nutshell: Casual cryptocurrency miners typically have to disable their antivirus program in order to mine, potentially making them vulnerable to security threats of all types. That’ll no longer be the case for select Norton 360 customers moving forward.

The cyber security firm has announced a new feature called Norton Crypto. From today, select customers in Norton’s early adopter program can now mine for Ethereum without having to disable their antivirus protection.

“As the crypto economy continues to become a more important part of our customers’ lives, we want to empower them to mine cryptocurrency with Norton,” said NortonLifeLock CEO Vincent Pilette.

Norton customers are also invited to transfer their mined crypto into their Norton Crypto Wallet, a cloud-based storage solution that eliminates the risk of local hard drive failure.

There are more questions than answers at this point. For example, it’s unclear if Norton is operating a mining pool, which groups multiple users together to increase their chances of successfully mining a block. If a pool is in place, Norton would likely collect a small operator fee as other mining pools do, thus making this a new stream of income for the company.

It’s also unclear if Norton forces users to use their cloud wallet, or if you are free to transfer mined crypto to the wallet / exchange of your choice. The latter seems most likely, but I’m not certain.

The viability of casual mining using GPUs is also up in the air, especially given Nvidia's recent stance against mining using its newer graphics cards.

Image credit TimeShops

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/89926-norton-users-can-mine-ethereum-without-having-disable.html

 

[BadThad]

You left out one thing: NORTON SUCKS

 

[OortCloud]

Because Norton wasn't CPU intensive enough already, they thought it would be a good idea for it to do some hashing as well. Just running Norton should award you with some form of 'proof of work' cryptocurrency....

 

[terzaerian]

This may be the most surreal tech news of the year.

It does look like Norton is paying you in Eth, but either way I'd be leery of their cloud wallet, especially if it doesn't let you directly send the Eth on the network or tries to pay you out in USD instead.

The UI pictured sure looks simple and intuitive, but it doesn't seem to reveal which mining algos are being used or how. The software I use includes fairly deep configs for CPU and GPU, which algos are used, under or overclocking, etc.

They're also shortly going to have to update it once Etherum transitions to proof of stake and mining stops.

 

[Scshadow]

No thanks. Norton has had a bad reputation for a long time. I'd be willing to bet that if you let Norton hash on your computer, they're probably keeping a portion as a service fee and trickling a little bit of money to you for compensation. It would be criminal for Norton to charge users for their anti virus service while skimming crypto on the side and I bet they will still charge. The only thing that would make any sense at all is if they gave the software license away for free. But as others have said, Norton has been known to be CPU intensive. So I can't say you could pay me to install Norton onto my system. Unless someone comes out and tests the application and find its acceptable performance, you just couldn't pay me to install Norton.

 

[ypsylon]

Any version of Norton Utilities was byword for safety and good maintenance during DOS times. As Windows 95-> era started Norton got fatter and fatter and more useless with each passing year. To the point we end with this piece of news^^^.

Norton Suite devolved to become parasite itself.

 

[BadThad]

Any version of Norton Utilities was byword for safety and good maintenance during DOS times. As Windows 95-> era started Norton got fatter and fatter and more useless with each passing year. To the point we end with this piece of news^^^.

Norton Suite devolved to become parasite itself.

I've cleaned the Norton infection off so many PCs in the past I lost count! I've seen older, weak CPUs at 70+% utilization at IDLE, worse CPU usage than most malware and viruses!