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