“…to the best of our knowledge, we were able to disarm the threat before it was able to do any harm.” – Piriform, the makers of CCleaner
It has come to our attention that CCleaner, a product that we install as part of our Security Software suite on most computers, has recently been compromised by a malicious third party. The company that makes CCleaner, Piriform, states that “…to the best of our knowledge, we were able to disarm the threat before it was able to do any harm.” Piriform (owned by Avast), has released a statement and technical breakdown of the compromise on their blog, which can be found by following this link.
The infected version was 5.33.6162 of CCleaner and version 1.07.3191 of CCleaner Cloud. The threat aimed to send non-personally identifiable information to third-party servers and to then download a second bit of code that may have further infected the affected systems. Fortunately, it seems that Piriform has caught the infection and nullified it completely before it was able to move into its “second stage”.
That said, we do still recommend that you upgrade your version of CCleaner to the latest version. At the time of writing, the latest version is 5.34 and can be downloaded directly from Piriform’s website at: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard. Clicking on the link will begin the download immediately.
If you need assistance with upgrading CCleaner, call us at 252-558-1280 to schedule a free remote appointment. We are offering a free 15 minute remote session until September 31st for all new and existing customers to address this issue.