C Cleaner - Hacked

[W3WN]

For the benefit of those who haven't heard about this...

C Cleaner, in the past a very useful utility for cleaning the "crud" out of machines, recently had it's download server hacked, on or about August 15th of this year. So people downloading what they thought was an updated (or new) version were also downloading malware to their machines.

Allegedly, over 2.3 million users have been affected.

Further, it's now coming out that at least some versions of the hack include a "second stage payload" that is creating (or trying to create) a backdoor into computer systems.

See:
http://thehackernews.com/2017/09/ccleaner-hacked-malware.html
http://thehackernews.com/2017/09/ccleaner-malware-hacking.html

Amongst many other Tech related news sources.


...almost forgot. CCleaner is now part of Avast, and this is what they have to say on the matter:
https://blog.avast.com/progress-on-ccleaner-investigation

[WØTKX]

I do use CCleaner, but I don't uprade it that often. Using one of the previous "safe" versions.

Only use it very occasionaly (about once a year), to clean up update dust.

Duplicate file finder is far more useful to free up space.