Corsair RM1200X SHIFT 1200W PSU Review
Intel NUC 13 Pro (Arena Canyon) review
Endorfy Arx 700 Air chassis review
Beelink SER5 Pro (Ryzen 7 5800H) mini PC review
Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Review - 12GB/s
Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 PULSE review
Gainward GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GHOST review
Radeon RX 7600 review
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti TUF Gaming review
MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X TRIO review
Daughter Company Norton (Avira Antivirus) also contains cryptominer
Last week we reported that Norton is now actively inserting a crypto miner in the Norton 360 security software suite. And it seems however that Norton (NortonLifeLock) really is keen on using your hardware and electricity as in their daughter company Avira Antivirus a similar scheme has been injected.
Avira has half a billion users worldwide at the time of writing. According to Brian Krebs, the service is primarily due to the fact that the antivirus is available for free. Other antivirus products began detecting the presence of a crypto miner embedded within the Avira installation in September, even though Avira Crypto was integrated to the software only a few months earlier in October. Brian Krebs has reached out to NortonLifeLock for comment, but has not yet received a response:
Founded in 2006, Avira Operations GmbH & Co. KG is a German multinational software company best known for their Avira Free Security (a.k.a. Avira Free Antivirus). In January 2021, Avira was acquired by Tempe, Ariz.-based NortonLifeLock Inc., the same company that now owns Norton 360.
In 2017, the identity theft protection company LifeLock was acquired by Symantec Corp., which was renamed to NortonLifeLock in 2019. LifeLock is now included in the Norton 360 service; Avira offers users a similar service called Breach Monitor.
Like Norton 360, Avira comes with a cryptominer already installed, but customers have to opt in to using the service that powers it. Avira’s FAQ on its cryptomining service is somewhat sparse. For example, it doesn’t specify how much NortonLifeLock gets out of the deal (NortonLifeLock keeps 15 percent of any cryptocurrency mined by Norton Crypto). Google's Virustotal.com, now has detected the miner inside the anti-virus software, and tags it as a Trojan.Coinminer
Currently, the miner seems to be in opt-in status (voluntary), however, be aware that your electricity bill and hardware write-off will very likely cost you more than the benefit. Here's a tip: Remove the software and turn on Windows Defender.
CS:GO YouTuber McSkillet died in car crash, a mother and daughter killed - 08/27/2018 08:56 AM
Awful shocking news today. Just before the weekend a popular Counter Strike: Global Offensive player and YouTube creator died following a multi-car collision that occurred just outside of San Diego. R...
OWC offer SATA3 SSD PCIe Daughter Board - 05/25/2015 12:36 PM
So if you do not have SATA3 and are stuck on SATA / SATA2 but do want to maximize SSD performance, OWC might have the answer for you, at the expense of a PCie slot though. Other World Computing annou...
Nvidia announced G-Sync - eliminates stutter and screen tearing with a daughter module - 10/19/2013 01:38 PM
If you have been reading our blog today then you would have noticed that NVIDIA made several technology announcements the past two days. The first being G-Sync, a new techology with the help of new mo...
fry178
Senior Member
Posts: 1952
Joined: 2012-04-30
Senior Member
Posts: 1952
Joined: 2012-04-30
#5981536 Posted on: 01/12/2022 08:29 AM
@reix2x
lol. guess you also use the seatbelt only prior to an accident, right?
having a proper av that prevents infections in the first place, saves me time (no manual scan, no pain removing things),
and nowadays stuff doesnt just come from a locally installed file. how about links in pdfs?
at least i wont be someone that has to say " i should have used one..."
@reix2x
lol. guess you also use the seatbelt only prior to an accident, right?
having a proper av that prevents infections in the first place, saves me time (no manual scan, no pain removing things),
and nowadays stuff doesnt just come from a locally installed file. how about links in pdfs?
at least i wont be someone that has to say " i should have used one..."
Loobyluggs
Senior Member
Posts: 5036
Joined: 2008-09-07
Senior Member
Posts: 5036
Joined: 2008-09-07
#5981546 Posted on: 01/12/2022 09:38 AM
I remember the days when you used to have to load computer games into memory and rework your 640k of base for dos, now games come with 'launchers', which are also our VPN, our password manager, our PC disk cleaner, our browser that's just chrome with a few tweaks and sends your data to us, etc etc
I remember the days when AV software was to scan and protect against viruses, now it's try our VPN, try our password manager, try our PC disk cleaner, try our browser that's just chrome with a few tweaks and sends your data to us, etc etc
I remember the days when you used to have to load computer games into memory and rework your 640k of base for dos, now games come with 'launchers', which are also our VPN, our password manager, our PC disk cleaner, our browser that's just chrome with a few tweaks and sends your data to us, etc etc
BLEH!
Senior Member
Posts: 6367
Joined: 2010-10-17
Senior Member
Posts: 6367
Joined: 2010-10-17
#5981575 Posted on: 01/12/2022 11:25 AM
Explains why Avira went downhill...
Explains why Avira went downhill...
sykozis
Senior Member
Posts: 22472
Joined: 2008-07-14
Senior Member
Posts: 22472
Joined: 2008-07-14
#5981919 Posted on: 01/13/2022 06:10 AM
I don't even remember the last time I installed Norton or Avira. When Avira's scores started to drop, I stopped recommending it. That was a decade ago or so.... I used to recommend Sophos Home, but they started stripping features out of the free version and released a paid version to get all the features the free version used to have, and some useless extras. I have McAfee running on my son's and mother's computers as it's not resource heavy and the performance impact is unnoticeable without running benchmarks. The only annoying popup is to enable "safe search", which is useless and heavily filters searches to exclude a large number of viable results. I have Panda's free antivirus on my own system, but don't recommend it to others because it's UI is insanely laggy. If I'm going to any questionable sites, I disconnect or remove my harddrives and boot from an Ubuntu LiveDVD (yes, DVD, cuz it can't be infected due to the nature of DVD). Eventually I'll probably transition to Windows Defender.
I don't even remember the last time I installed Norton or Avira. When Avira's scores started to drop, I stopped recommending it. That was a decade ago or so.... I used to recommend Sophos Home, but they started stripping features out of the free version and released a paid version to get all the features the free version used to have, and some useless extras. I have McAfee running on my son's and mother's computers as it's not resource heavy and the performance impact is unnoticeable without running benchmarks. The only annoying popup is to enable "safe search", which is useless and heavily filters searches to exclude a large number of viable results. I have Panda's free antivirus on my own system, but don't recommend it to others because it's UI is insanely laggy. If I'm going to any questionable sites, I disconnect or remove my harddrives and boot from an Ubuntu LiveDVD (yes, DVD, cuz it can't be infected due to the nature of DVD). Eventually I'll probably transition to Windows Defender.
Click here to post a comment for this news story on the message forum.
Senior Member
Posts: 4399
Joined: 2008-07-15
I remember the days when AV software was to scan and protect against viruses, now it's try our VPN, try our password manager, try our PC disk cleaner, try our browser that's just chrome with a few tweaks and sends your data to us, etc etc