It is easy to pick on Piriform and Avast (which acquired the company less than two months ago) for this serious issue, but it may be more helpful to look at the bigger picture: both Piriform and MEDoc are small companies. This is true, as is the fact that the only data known to have been exfiltrated from infected machines was "non-sensitive", but it remains important for infected users to follow the advice from Cisco: reinstall machines or roll back to a previous version. In an announcement, Piriform, the company that produces CCleaner, played down the seriousness of the issue, saying that only a small percentage of its users would have downloaded the malicious version (the product did not install automatic updates). But it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the attackers had specific targets in mind when they spread the malware this would explain why it exfiltrated information about the infected machine. It is unclear whether this has happened, and there is no evidence to suggest that it did. However, should the attackers have used the backdoor as a foothold to install more persistent malware on an infected machine, this malware would likely still be active. The takedown of the C&C servers and the takeover of the relevant domains means that the original malware itself has now been neutralized. In a blog post, the Cisco researchers provide a good overview of the malware and its C&C communication to a hard-coded IP address, with a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as a backup communication channel. Researchers from Cisco Talos found a version of the product that came with a malicious payload added to it, which installed a backdoor on targeted systems. For the security community, 2017 might well be called the year of the update: two of the biggest security stories – the WannaCry outbreak and the Equifax breach – involved organizations being hit badly as a consequence of not having installed (security) updates, while another major story, that of (Not)Petya, concerned a threat that spread through a compromised update system used by the Ukrainian tax software MEDoc.Ī new story can now be added to the latter category: that of CCleaner, a legitimate tool widely used for cleaning up Windows and OS X computers.
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