A new, uncompromised version of CCleaner was released the same day and a clean version of CCleaner Cloud was released on Sept. Piriform said that Avast, its new parent company, had uncovered the attacks on Sept. A spokeswoman said that 2.27 million users had downloaded the August version of CCleaner while only 5,000 users had installed the compromised version of CCleaner Cloud. It advised users of CCleaner v and CCleaner Cloud v to download new versions. In a blog post, Piriform confirmed that two programs released in August were compromised. “There is nothing a user could have noticed,” Williams said, noting that the optimization software had a proper digital certificate, which means that other computers automatically trust the program.
Talos researcher Craig Williams said it was a sophisticated attack because it penetrated an established and trusted supplier in a manner similar to June’s “NotPetya” attack on companies that downloaded infected Ukrainian accounting software. At the time of the acquisition, the company said 130 million people used CCleaner.Ī version of CCleaner downloaded in August included remote administration tools that tried to connect to several unregistered web pages, presumably to download additional unauthorized programs, security researchers at Cisco’s (CSCO.O) Talos unit said. It cleans up junk programs and advertising cookies to speed up devices.ĬCleaner is the main product made by London’s Piriform, which was bought in July by Prague-based Avast, one of the world’s largest computer security vendors.
The malicious program was slipped into legitimate software called CCleaner, which is downloaded for personal computers and Android phones as often as five million times a week.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hackers broke into British company Piriform’s free software for optimizing computer performance last month potentially allowing them to control the devices of more than two million users, the company and independent researchers said on Monday.
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