Norton Antivirus now lets you mine cryptocurrency on idle PCs through its service, taking a 15% fee from your earnings. The catch: higher electricity bills, hardware wear, heat, and security risks. Corporate networks should disable it; tech-savvy users are better off mining solo with lower fees.
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Recently, Norton Antivirus announced that they had integrated a crypto mining capability in their cybersecurity product. Well, for the benefit of end users, if it seems odd to you that a security product would expand its features to include crypto mining, you would not be alone. Many other people are kind of scratching their head in bewilderment. So let's talk about what it does, the pros and cons, and my recommendation. Okay, so what does this do? The miner is a small program that turns on when the system is basically inactive. It leverages the video card to solve cryptocurrency mining math problems in massive parallel ways as part of a proof-of-work validation scheme of, well, in this case, Ethereum. The effort is coordinated by a central pool, which is run by Norton, that basically aggregates all the work from the many different systems to try and win these blocks. And each time the pool wins a block, the reward tokens are split among the miners and a fee is taken by the pool. The greater the combined GPU computing power, the more likely the pool will win any given block reward, which happens on a regular, continuous, uninterrupted cadence. The result is the participating miners in this get a share of the rewards, typically in the currency that they're mining. Those crypto tokens can then be sold on markets like stock shares or something else for regular currency like US dollars. Now Norton has set this system up so users must proactively opt in to take part in this program, which is a very good thing. We wouldn't want this running in the background. It would then be considered a malicious kind of thing. Um, so it's good that they have opt-in. Now the upside of all this is users of their product can leverage their system when they're not actively using it to earn a little bit of cryptocurrency if their PC meets the minimum technical requirements. Now, the downside is it uses electricity, it adds to the wear and tear of the system, it consumes network resources, and it could introduce vulnerabilities into the system itself. And that last one isn't a very good thing for software that's supposed to be acting like a guardian against malware. Given this is being run by a security company, we might assume that many of those risks are being properly managed, especially on the pool side and what mining software they're using, things of that sort. But who really knows? Now, these types of miners are electricity hogs, right? They really max out the performance of the video card, so the system itself will draw significantly more power than normal. Highly utilized GPUs also create a lot of heat that can degrade other system performance and actually degrade, um, the GPU itself. The mining software, likely including many third-party code and, and snippets, it could also be a threat, uh, again depending on which code they're using. And the network connection of the system to that external mining pool servers is also a potential avenue of infection. You have to open that up to allow communication to go back and forth. And that can potentially not only bring infections in, but it could allow a malicious insider to send or exfiltrate data on the outside. So if a system is taken over or if it's an untrusted user, right, a user acting maliciously, they could also use that to get data out, especially out of corporate networks. So it will consume more network resources like bandwidth, It'll create more logs if you're watching that, if the security tools are watching that, therefore more logs, more telemetry is being data or created that the security systems have to interpret and inspect. So that can be a drag on the system. And if it's a work PC, this all might be going through VPN resources that can consume, right, or saturate those or increase cost if it's going through an external vendor. It really depends on the environment, how it's configured. Now, this mining software itself, again, we talked about it could cause or introduce risks, uh, security risks, but it could also just introduce system risks. It's software. It can create system failures, system errors, force a reboot from time to time. And many of these are simple, but some users might require technical support, and that could be a call to the help desk, right? And that just adds more work. So what's the best course of action here? Well, my recommendations are as follows. For employers, don't allow this. Don't allow this to be set up on company-owned devices. Right, don't allow this to run on corporate networks. This is gonna increase the overall electricity costs. And if it's inside an office, that means the company's paying the electricity. It's going to impact the network resources and it could generate calls to the IT department. And we don't want that. The CISO, right, will need to deal with increased endpoint risks, potentially greater VPN costs, and more complex endpoint configurations, and it's just not worth the hassle. Disable these miners and block the network connections out to the mining pools. We don't even want personal machines or BYOD devices to come on the network and consume all those resources and electricity and all that. It's just not worth it, so don't allow it. Now, for individuals who use these products I would say yes, if, if you're looking for an easy entry into the world of mining cryptocurrency. But again, use this at your own risk. If this is your personal system and you're doing it from home and you're paying the electric bills and you're willing to take the risks, yeah, this is an easy way to enter in and start earning a little bit of crypto. It won't make you rich, but Uh, it's a good start. Now for the tech savvy people out there that want to mine cryptocurrency, I would actually say no because the fees on this that Norton is collecting is far too high. Norton is taking 15% of the value of whatever is being mined from your PC, and most other mining pools out there, they charge right around 1%. So that's a big difference. And if you are secure, if you are technically savvy and do want to mine on your system, there are lots of different guides out there to help you get set up as part of a do-it-yourself kind of project. And you can then, you know, earn that, that extra percentage that right now Norton would be taking. Overall, Norton is kind of leading in this space. We're not seeing it from a whole bunch of other vendors, but Norton isn't the first. Actually, Avira, also another AV company, has previously announced and set up some similar crypto mining capability. The thing is, Norton purchased Avira. In fact, Norton just finished up purchasing Avast too, which has millions and millions of users out there. So we may see this in the Avast product eventually as well. So this may become more of a norm if many people embrace this, but again, there are risks. Whatever you choose, just make sure that you're safe. And let me know in the comment section your thoughts and if you would use such a service. Thanks for watching. If you like these cybersecurity videos, please click the like button, leave a comment, and subscribe to the Cybersecurity Insights channel. I put out a video about every week on various cybersecurity topics, risks, ideas, events, and best practices. Let's continue to communicate and collaborate together. That's how we make cybersecurity strong in protecting the global digital ecosystem.
