#Ccleaner malware high level update#
#Ccleaner malware high level software#

“Given that CCleaner is a consumer-oriented product, this was a typical watering hole attack where the vast majority of users were uninteresting for the attacker, but select ones were,” said the duo.Īvast refused to name the targets publicly.

The initial attack affected 2.27 million CCleaner customers, meaning the collateral damage was huge.

#Ccleaner malware high level update#

Server logs indicate eight tech and telecoms firms received the payload, with potentially hundreds of machines infected – although only 20 were spotted during the three days logs were collected for, according to an update from Avast CEO, Vince Steckler and CTO Ondrej Vlcek. Updates from both Cisco Talos and Avast – the company which now owns CCleaner developer Periform – explained that, contrary to initial impressions, a second stage payload was delivered from the C&C server.

#Ccleaner malware high level software#

In that case, as in the CCleaner attack, victims installed seemingly legitimate software from a small but trusted company, only to find that it had been silently corrupted, deeply infecting their IT systems.A cyber-attack revealed this week which spread via popular performance optimization tool CCleaner was designed to target several major technology firms, it has emerged. Two months earlier, hackers hijacked the update mechanism of the Ukrainian accounting software MeDoc to deliver a destructive piece of software known as NotPetya, causing massive damage to companies in Ukraine as well as in Europe and the United States.

But it already represents another serious example in the string of software supply-chain attacks that have recently rocked the internet. The exact dimensions of the CCleaner attack will likely continue to be redrawn, as analysis continues. 'If you didn’t restore your system from backup, you’re at high risk of not having cleaned this up,' Williams says. Instead, the researchers recommend that anyone affected fully restore their machines from backup versions prior to the installation of Avast's tainted security program. On Wednesday, researchers at Cisco's Talos security division revealed that they've now analyzed the hackers' 'command-and-control' server to which those malicious versions of CCleaner connected.įor any company that may have had computers running the corrupted version of CCleaner on their network, Cisco warns that its findings mean merely deleting that application is no guarantee the CCleaner backdoor wasn't used to plant a secondary piece of malware on their network, one with its own, still-active command and control server. It wound up installed on more than 700,000 computers. Researchers now believe that the hackers behind it were bent not only on mass infections, but on targeted espionage that tried to gain access to the networks of at least 18 tech firms.Įarlier this week, security firms Morphisec and Cisco revealed that CCleaner, a piece of security software distributed by Czech company Avast, had been hijacked by hackers and loaded with a backdoor that evaded the company's security checks. But now it's becoming clear exactly how bad the results of the recent CCleaner malware outbreak may be. Hundreds of thousands of computers getting penetrated by a corrupted version of an ultra-common piece of security software was never going to end well.

Update: On September 25, Avast confirmed that of the 18 companies targeted, a total of 40 computers were successfully infected with a secondary malware installation at the following companies: Samsung, Sony, Asus, Intel, VMWare, O2, Singtel, Gauselmann, Dyn, Chunghwa and Fujitsu.