Security News > 2021 > June > Antivirus that mines Ethereum sounds a bit wrong, right? Norton has started selling it

NortonLifeLock, the company that offers the consumer products Broadcom didn't want when it bought Symantec, has started to offer Ethereum mining as a feature of its Norton 360 security suite.

The company says, funnily enough, a better approach is to have its computer security software mine Ethereum while it runs, then store the results in the Norton cloud.

A supplied screenshot depicts use of a "Primary" GPU. Plenty of PCs make do with integrated graphics processors, and it is unclear if NortonLifeLock proposes to use those, and what would happen if a customer started to do something that wants access to either the baked-in graphics chipset or any discrete GPUs.

Nor has NortonLifeLock said how its "Norton Crypto" wallets will operate, or how users will be able to use the wallets to convert coins to cash or ultimately buy stuff with Ethereum.

The Register can imagine NortonLifeLock could end up sitting on a stack of ETH before its customers cash out.

The stuff about miners being insecure may well be right, but also feels a bit fuzzy as it is not hard to find Ethereum mining apps that run on PCs. Also unmentioned is whether NortonLifeLock will allow the product to operate in jurisdictions such as China, where cryptocurrencies are all-but-banned, or India where cryptocurrency is frowned upon.

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