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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.
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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.
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Thus, CCleaner is BS.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. Run a scan.ĭespite the fact that the VM you created is brand new and has 0 third party applications installed besides CCleaner I guarantee you the scan you run will find errors. Just select the unallocated space and click nextĪfter the install completes it will want you to join a network but you haven't attached a virtual network card so you'll wan to click "I don't have internet" and then "continue with limited setup"įor the username put "user" and for the password just hit the enter key so that there's no passwordĪccept all the default for everything elseĪttach a gigabit virtual network adapter to the VM and then use Microsoft Edge to download and install the latest version of CCleaner 9. Use a recent copy like 21H12ĭon't create any partitions during the install process.
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Allocate 8GB of RAM to it, 4CPU cores, and virtual disk with at least 100GB of spaceĪttach an unmodified Windows 10 Pro installer in. Install VirtualBox (or if you have a server you can use HyperV or VMware)Ĭreate a virtual machine. So if you really want proof here's what you do:
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Obviously preinstalled bloatware could compromise the experiment since we don't have a convenient way of proving that "SmartyByte" or a trial version of McAfee aren't modifying registry keys in ways CCleaner doesn't like. How could every brand new business-grade computer have registry issues? I say "business-grade" because new computers purchased with Windows 10/11 Pro tend to lack most of the preinstalled BS you find on computers with home editions of Windows. At the very least, the scan will find and offer to fix a significant amount of "registry errors". Anyone with access to a brand new business-grade computer can prove this by installing CCleaner and running a scan.
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One thing I can tell you about CCleaner is that it's full of shit. I work for an MSP that provides IT support, consulting, and network administration to around 1,000 medium to large businesses.
