law enforcement to shut down a server located in the United States to which traffic was set to be directed. Williams said Talos detected the issue at an early stage, when the hackers appeared to be collecting information from infected machines, rather than forcing them to install new programs.

The nature of the attack code suggests that the hacker won access to a machine used to create CCleaner, Williams said.ĬCleaner does not update automatically, so each person who has installed the problematic version will need to delete it and install a fresh version, he said. A new, uncompromised version of CCleaner was released the same day and a clean version of CCleaner Cloud was released on 15 September, it said. Piriform said Avast, its new parent company, had uncovered the attacks on September 12. It did not disclose how many users were affected. It advised users of CCleaner v and CCleaner Cloud v to download new versions. In a blog post, Piriform confirmed that two programmes 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 other computers automatically trust the program. Talos researcher Craig Williams said it was a sophisticated attack since 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 Talos unit said. It cleans up junk programmes 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 5 million times a week.

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