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| Screen Capture from Piriform |
CCleaner, one of the most popular operating system (mainly Microsoft Windows) optimizing software, was compromised and hacked. CCleaner’s developer, Piriform confirmed the security issue and took couple actions to deal with it, including contacting the law enforcement departments. The incident is expected to affect more than 2 million people, who downloaded the affected software version.
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CCleaner is used to “clean” up unused files and settings in users’ computers, as well as optimizing background startup programs, to improve system responsiveness and speed. The software is especially useful for computers with tons of third-party programs. Free and paid versions are provided by Piriform. The software has over 2 billion downloads.
From Piriform:
An unauthorized modification of the CCleaner.exe binary resulted in an insertion of a two-stage backdoor capable of running code received from a remote IP address on affected systems.
According to Piriform’s blog post on 18 September, malicious code and activities were found in version 5.33.6162 of CCleaner and version 1.07.3191 of CCleaner Cloud. Hackers had gained access to the pre-release softwares and implemented remote administrative tools, collecting users’ computers information quietly. Computers’ names, installed software, MAC addresses of the network adapters and more are collected by the software and sent to an external IP address.
Piriform has shut down the affected server, claiming that they were able to resolve the threat before any actual damage is caused. The method and the origination of the attack are still under investigation. New clean versions of CCleaner and CCleaner Cloud are released. Piriform urges users to quickly update to version 5.34 or higher, while cloud version will be automatically updated.
New version of CCleaner can be downloaded from here.
Source from Piriform.
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