The utility tool CCleaner was made by Piriform in 2004, which was later acquired by Avast in 2017. Unfortunately, the CCleaner malware issues came after many users found great potential in the service.
However, Piriform estimated that up to 3 percent of its users (up to 2.27 million people) were affected by the malicious installation.Īffected users are strongly recommended to update their CCleaner software to version 5.34 or higher, in order to protect their computers from being compromised. Hackers injected malware into the app and infected computers by accessing a backdoor to download servers used by Avast. CCleaner claims to have over 2 billion downloads worldwide as of November 2016 and is reportedly adding new users at a rate of 5 million a week," Talos said.
"The impact of this attack could be severe given the extremely high number of systems possibly affected. Buy Now Download Free Trial 24. The Malwarebytes scan does a pretty good job of finding both vulnerabilities and possible malware. Additional information like whether the process is running with admin privileges and whether it is a 64-bit system.Īccording to the Talos researchers, around 5 million people download CCleaner (or Crap Cleaner) each week, which indicates that more than 20 Million people could have been infected with the malicious version the app. As I said before, Malwarebytes is designed to protect your computer from malware, while CCleaner is primarily designed to speed up your computer, remove junk, and protect your privacy.It appears to have been an exploit of the CCleaner installer’s download server. List of installed software, including Windows updates For about 22 days, the CCleaner system maintenance application distributed malware through its official channels.The malicious software was programmed to collect a large number of user data, including: