CCleaner Was Hacked: What You Need to Know

Author: Whitson Gordon / Source: howtogeek.com

CCleaner, the incredibly popular PC maintenance utility, has been hacked to include malware. Here’s how to tell if you were affected, and what you should do.

The attack was discovered by researchers at Cisco Talos, who found that “the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.

33. . .also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner.” CCleaner’s parent company, Piriform (who was recently bought by

Twitter

), acknowledged the issue shortly thereafter.

Since CCleaner claims to have millions of downloads per week, that is potentially a severe issue.

What Does the Malware Do?

The malware did not actively harm systems, but it did encrypt and collect information that could be used to harm your system in the future. In particular, according to Piriform, it created a unique identifier for the computer and collected:

• Name of the computer
• List of installed software, including Windows updates
• List of running processes
• MAC addresses of first three network adapters
• Additional information whether the process is running with administrator privileges, whether it is a 64-bit system, etc.

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