Norton 360 users complain that from December 31, 2021, the new version of the antivirus began installing the miner on the computers of users who did not give their consent. That is, it now works by default, if you do not notice the checkboxes during the Norton 360 installation phase.
The reference section states that Norton Crypto (NCrypt.exe) runs on computers that meet the minimum system requirements. There is no possibility of removing the miner by standard means.
To disable the miner, you will have to physically delete the NCrypt.exe file from the Program Files \ Norton working directory, although in this case no one can guarantee that it will not recover after the next automatic update.
Minimum system requirements: Nvidia video cards with 6 GB of memory, 1 GHz processor, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8 or Windows 10. The miner does not work under Linux, MacOS or Windows 10 S.
Thus, the lucky owners of Norton 360 antivirus can get additional income on an idle GPU. So far, only Ethereum is supported. A wallet is automatically created for each miner, and the key is “securely stored in the cloud” by Norton. All coins go to the wallet, except for the pool commission of 15%. Norton Crypto supports the transfer of funds to the Coinbase exchange.
The inclusion of Norton 360 users in mining may slightly increase the network hash rate, which in the Bitcoin network yesterday fell by about 18% across all pools due to the fact that Kazakhstan was disconnected from the Internet (the second country in the world in mining after the United States).
Some Reddit users are outraged by this behavior of the program. They recall that mining software used to be recognized by antivirus as malicious software. And exactly the opposite happens. This is a bit like what Obi-Wan Kenobi said after defeating Anakin Skywalker.
The Norton Crypto module was introduced in July 2021. For the first six months, it did not start by default.
bbabo.Net