The popular free alternative to clean up your Windows and make it snappy again has been hacked!
CCleaner now comes with a backdoor and it is very sophisticated. It stays in memory which makes it hard to analyze and works in three phases.
Step one gathers vital data about hardware and software and prepares for further infection.
Further infection could be anything and it will not help to only remove the stage one infection.
If you are infected you need to reformat your Hard-drive
Step two is to spread ransomeware.worm to targeted IT giants.
Step thre is to take control of your certificates and infrastructure and be in total control of your digital life.
This can be in stealth mode - so you won't even know.
This is bad for one of the most trusted cleanup systems out there
What to do?
CCleaner was infected for 31 days and has already made a lot of damage and no one can say how much!
CCleaner 5.33 and CCleaner Cloud 1.07.3191 are infected.
If you have it installed or updated it in September- remove it and reformat your disk!
The guys behind the hack are real pros and could be from China according to the traces found.
But given the level of sophistication this could well be an intended false clue.
(The FBI or NSA probably have this kind of sophistication too as do the Russians....)
More here
