Normally anti-virus applications are designed to squash hidden crypto-miners on your PC, but, thinking out of the box, NortonLifelock (previously Symantec) has decided a better idea would be to ship their software with its own built-in miner.

“As the crypto economy continues to become a more important part of our customers’ lives, we want to empower them to mine cryptocurrency with Norton, a brand they trust,” said Vincent Pilette, CEO of NortonLifeLock. “Norton Crypto is yet another innovative example of how we are expanding our Cyber Safety platform to protect our customers’ ever-evolving digital lives.”

Norton Crypto mines Ethereum, likely by pooling the GPUs of the PCs the software is installed on, and shares the revenue with users who sign up for the service.

Norton says this offers a safe way for PC users to become miners, without installing sketchy software on their PCs. Earnings are stored safely in the Norton Crypto Wallet in the cloud where they cannot be lost due to hard drive failure.

“We are proud to be the first consumer Cyber Safety company to offer coinminers the ability to safely and easily turn the idle time on their PCs into an opportunity to earn digital currency,” said Gagan Singh, chief product officer at NortonLifeLock. “With Norton Crypto, our customers can mine for cryptocurrency with just a few clicks, avoiding many barriers to entry in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

The feature is rolling out in the next few weeks.

via BleepingComputer

Norton builds a Ethereum crypto-miner into Norton anti-virus