Last month hackers hacked a free PC performance program from Britain's Piriform, allowing them to control more than 2 million users, the company and independent researchers said Monday.
The company said the malicious program was hidden in its famous program CCleaner, which has more than 5 million downloads of personal computers and Android phones a week. Which is used to clean up software "cookies" and cookies for advertising to speed up hardware.
Clycer is the main product of Pervorm, which was purchased last July by the Czech information security company Avast. At the time of the acquisition, the company announced more than 130 million users of the "Cleaner" program.
Security researchers at Cisco's Talos unit said a copy ofCCleanerr, which was downloaded in August, included remote administration tools that tried to connect to many unregistered Web pages that might download additional software Authorized.
The researcher at Talos, Craig Williams, said it was a sophisticated attack because it penetrated a reliable supplier like the NotPetya attack, which in June attacked companies that downloaded infected Ukrainian accounting software.
Williams said there is nothing the user can notice. He pointed out that the program to improve the performance of computers and phones has an authentic digital certificate, which means that other computers automatically trust the program.
It is noteworthy that the program "C Cleaner" can not be updated automatically, so each user who downloaded the hacked version deleted and download a new version, according to Williams, who pointed out that Talos discovered the problem in its early stages, when it appeared that the pirates began collecting information On infected devices, rather than forcing them to download new programs.