Hackers Deploy Anti-Virus

Yesterdays reveal from Norton Anti-Virus that they will include and pushout Ethereum miners as part of their software is both shocking and hilarious.

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

Norton stated that they will pushout a mining feature in their product within weeks. Its not clear what this means entirely, either:

1. Norton will bundle a feature to allow users to mine ethereum on their systems and collect the rewards in their own wallets
2. Norton will silently mine when users are not active on their systems and profits will go to Norton
3. Norton will reduce or even make their product free for miners if they permit Norton the ability to do this.

Firstly lets address the elephant in the room, Norton clearly havent done thier homework and read the eth 2.0 documentation and the move away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake protocols.

Secondly all options are bad for the consumer, rewards for mining are miniscule and the effect on the system resources, lifespan and energy consumption outweigh the returns for the average home computer at every level.

I investigate compromises everyday and see many systems being pwned to deploy crypto miners by script kiddies (and North Korea). Imagine when attackers pwn a system only to deploy Norton Anti-virus and profit from the mining. This will be hilarious. What does the rest of the community do, we will have to flag Norton as a malicious tool and create IOC’s for it. Then what if we get to a compromise where they are legitimately using Norton and everything lights up red on our dashboards.

It’s going to be interesting to see the fallout from the statement, I cant realistically see it going anywhere at this stage unless there is a convincing paper to follow. Either way the entire crypto market is shifting away from resource heavy and power consuming mining. We will see.