Hackers hid malware in CCleaner antivirus software

The popular computer cleaning app, CCleaner, has been compromised for the past 4-5 weeks, according to a report by Cisco’s Talos Intelligence. The recent update of CCleaner distributed malware. At the time of owing it, the company said it almost had 1.30 million people who are using the CCleaner.

Avast vice-president: products Paul Yung has issued a statement confirming that the 5.33.6162 version of CCleaner and the 1.07.3191 version of CCleaner Cloud were illegally modified before being released to the public.

Data transmitted to the attacker’s server included the computer’s name, IP address, a list of installed software, a list of active software, and a list of network adapters. Recently, in Equifax data breach, personal and financial data of 143 million USA citizens was hacked.

CCleaner was created by Piriform, which was acquired by Avast only in July. CCleaner had more than two billion downloads as of November a year ago. But Talos said the impact of the attack could be more severe, given that CCleaner was reported to be adding five million new users a week. Avast Piriform believes that the security threat was contained and tackled before the breach was able to harm any customers. “This trust relationship is then abused to attack organizations and individuals and may be performed for a number of different reasons”. You should still run a malware scan though because that’s always the right thing to do.

Yung said the company could not yet confirm how the malicious code had appeared in the software, but an investigation was “ongoing”. That essentially means the firm was guaranteeing its software was safe to download. Make sure to restore before August 15 which is when version 5.3 rolled out. Piriform Ltd., the maker of CCleaner, confirmed in a blog post today that certain versions of the software were compromised with a hidden backdoor that may have allowed hackers to harvest data from users.

“We are continuing to investigate how this compromise happened, who did it, and why”, said Piriform.

If you are running CCleaner you should update it to the latest version (5.34); CCleaner does not auto-update. Security researchers have also advised users to restoring their machines to a state before August 15, 2017. Users of our cloud version have received an automated update.