Remember the Norton Cryptominer I wrote about last week? The story continues....

[thewayne]

Symantec 360, owned by the somewhat dubious NortonLifeLock installs a cryptominer for Ethereum and takes 15% off the top. Let's face it: that's a great business model for NLL! Free money for people who aren't smart enough to install their own miner or who just don't care!

Well, they didn't stop there.

There's a German anti-virus package called Avira that is or was available for free. They were acquired by NortonLifeLock. And now 500,000,000 Avira users are having a cryptominer being pushed on them by NLL to mine Ethereum - complete with the 15% shaved off the top back to their corporate overlord NortonLifeLock.

It's good to be the king! Or at least the corporation controlling your software!

Personally, for the PC I recommend Zone Alarm Pro. Very solid software that I've used for years, does a good job with firewall replacing Microsoft's and also with anti-virus and anti-malware. And they sell a package that lets you install it on multiple PCs for what I consider a reasonable price - I pay for my gaming laptop and my dad's rig in Phoenix.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/01/500m-avira-antivirus-users-introduced-to-cryptomining/

Comments

[kathmandu]

I appreciated your alert on that, last week. I checked my work computer and it doesn't look like the cryptominer is on there. That computer is slow enough without having a cryptominer clogging it up.

My acquaintances don't understand why I find the world of business so fascinating and exciting. But every so often we get scandals like this, and I break out the popcorn.

[dewline]

I remember ZoneAlarm from my Windows-at-home days.

And I definitely don't want to be roped into cryptocurrency-mining. At all.

[silveradept]

Must be really nice to have such an installed customer base that you can try to recruit for your crypto mining network.

Aw fuck fuck a doo duck:P

[captainsblog]

I put Avira on my backup laptop after finding out that both AVG and Avast were run by the same company and had been caught data mining and selling their customers' site.

They seemed nice.

I can add a McAfee subscription to it. Nothing HE's ever done wrong, huh.

Re: Aw fuck fuck a doo duck:P

[thewayne]

Ah, bummer!  I didn't know, or didn't remember, that AVG/Avast were the same company.  I had used AVG in the past, before I switched back to paying for Zone Alarm Pro.  I had not heard about them collecting and selling user info.  I have not heard of Zone Alarm selling user info, but that only means that I haven't heard about it.