I just saw this horrifying Twitter thread. The thread makes it appear that Norton is stealthily downloading a cryptocurrency miner and running it without user consent. Instant outrage!
Except
- It’s Twitter
- If true this would almost certainly be illegal and at best open Norton to ruinous law suits
Perhaps a bit of wariness is appropriate. Here’s what Norton has to say about it. That makes it sound as if what’s happening is that Norton is providing a cryptocurrency miner that you can run if you like. If that’s the case, you can complain about the 15% fee but there’s nothing underhanded going on.
So the question is: what is going on here? If the thread is accurate it’s a major scandal but it’s a good rule to treat almost everything you see on Twitter with skepticism. Indeed, the majority of the Web seems to be treating this as a discretionary application that you can run if you like, not as a stealth download to steal your CPU cycles.
I didn’t go trawling in the Twitter swamp to find this thread. It came to me from my Hacker News feed. There was a long discussion on Hacker News but only one person noted Norton’s side of the story and that person was instantly shouted down. There’s enough character assassination on Twitter without spreading it on technical news sites. We should do better.
UPDATE : Krebs on Security has a post that summarizes and discusses the issue. The TL;DR is that while there is plenty to not like, Norton’s cryptocurrency miner does not run without the user’s consent. If you’re interested in this story, read Krebs’ post for a good account of what’s going on.