It seems that Equifax hack isn’t the only major cyber attack that everyone needs to be aware of. According to researchers at Cisco Talos, download servers used by Avast (company that owns CCleaner) were compromised to distribute malware that was planted inside CCleaner. The app has more than 2 billion downloads.
The Talos team says that “For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner.” Furthermore, “Piriform believes that these users are safe now as its investigation indicates it was able to disarm the threat before it was able to do any harm.”
According to Forbes, it seems that only 2.27 million users have been affected by this malware. The CCleaner app for Windows has already been updated to a version that doesn’t contain the backdoor, but so far, there are users that are affected.
CCleaner is a “crap cleaner” app that has been downloaded more than 2 billion times, according to Avast. This software wipes out cookies and offers some web privacy protections for users.