Following a cyberattack, the publisher of CCleaner, the famous PC cleaning utility, saw its users’ personal data leaked onto the Dark Web. The company has already implemented protective measures.
No one is safe from cyberattacks, organizations and businesses as well as individuals! CCleaner, the very popular PC cleaning and optimization utility – which allows you to recover available disk space but also to lighten the system and software to make the computer run more smoothly – has also been affected by cybercriminals. It is Troy Hunt, the founder of Have I Been Pwned? – A compromised personal data verification site –who made the information public by publishing on X (formerly Twitter) an email sent by Piriform Software, the publisher of CCleaner. Following a data disclosure on the Dark Web, the company had to warn users that hackers had stolen a wealth of personal information about its paying customers following a data breach in May. This information includes their names, contact details (emails, phone numbers), and details about the products they purchased from CCleaner. Apparently, there was no compromise of banking details, credit cards or login credentials. However, the company calls for vigilance, because of the risks of phishing, and offers affected users a six-month subscription to Avast BreachGuard, a comprehensive Dark Web monitoring service, in order to limit the risks.
CCleaner hack: personal data stolen
Although it is published by Piriform Software, CCleaner now belongs to Gen Digital, a group that also owns several other cybersecurity brands such as Avast, AVG, Avira and NortonLifeLock. In total, the company has nearly 500 million users worldwide, including around 65 million paying users. However, the number of users for the paid version of CCleaner is not specified.
The famous security breach that led to the data leak from the cleaning utility dates back to last May. A vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer solution allowed Clop ransomware to steal, over several months, sensitive data from thousands of organizations that stored it on these Internet-connected systems. So far, more than 2,500 organizations have confirmed MOVEit-related data breaches since May, representing at least 66 million people – but the number is actually much higher, and more are still being discovered. new victims, like CCleaner. The incidents recorded involve the theft of customer and/or employee data. According to information communicated to TechCrunch According to Gen Digital spokesperson Jess Monney, less than 2% of customers were affected by this data breach, which includes phone numbers, email addresses and billing addresses. Even if we do not know the exact number of people affected, this incident is mild compared to the serious hack that hit CCleaner in 2017. Cybercriminals managed to implant malware in the software to spy on more than two million users…