Queries regarding the CCleaner issue

[Sohom]

Hi, in the last one month or so i may have used ccleaner like 1 or 2 times for a brief period of time. I was actually using the 5.33 version. After reading the news, i uninstalled ccleaner, checked with antivruses and malwarebytes and it came out clean. But my main concern is about the privacy, recent news shows that a lot of personal information was communicated through the hacked servers. Even news state maybe kelogging, key strokes hack tools may have been used.
So, my question is that do i require to format my machine. I changed a lot of passwords of my existing accounts on most of the sites. My question about formatting is because i have a lot of data in my pc and backing them all up and rearranging stuff will take a lot of time.
Any info regarding the hack and advices is welcomed. Thank you.

 

[mdd1963]

Were you running a 32 bit OS? If not, you were unaffected, and, and/all actions taken were but merely good practice for if/when the malware actually affected your system.

 

[Sohom]

Were you running a 32 bit OS? If not, you were unaffected, and, and/all actions taken were but merely good practice for if/when the malware actually affected your system.

Ok. Actually, i was reading this statement from piriform where in the last line it states that people using the 32 bit version of ccleaner can be affected.
http/www.piriform.com/news/release-announcements/2017/9/18/security-notification-for-ccleaner-v5336162-and-ccleaner-cloud-v1073191-for-32-bit-windows-users

 

[mdd1963]

we will assume their statement is accurate, perhaps the '32 bit caveat' applied to the application, not the OS....(as, obviously some might have chosen 32bit version and run it on a 64 bit OS just fine)

Still, they claim replace the software, and you are fine....no exploits beyond some info gathering were done....allegedly

 

[Kenton82]

I am still confused over this too, as on 4/5 machines i have, each had a trojan. The anti virus programs found, and erased them, but these are 64bit versions, on 64bit windows 7 & 10.....

 

[COLGeek]

If you had the CCleaner v5.33 install file saved on your system, it would have likely been flagged as malware, even on 64-bit systems.

 

[Kenton82]

If you had the CCleaner v5.33 install file saved on your system, it would have likely been flagged as malware, even on 64-bit systems.

Gotcha, that makes sense!

 

[Avast-Team]

Update from the Avast Threat Labs today: https/blog.avast.com/additional-information-regarding-the-recent-ccleaner-apt-security-incident

 

[Sohom]

Update from the Avast Threat Labs today: https/blog.avast.com/additional-information-regarding-the-recent-ccleaner-apt-security-incident

Thanks for a detailed study of the ccleaner hack... Now this seems a complete analysis of the ccleaner hacker methodology.

 

[Sohom]

Ok, so a little update... I installed a temporary HDD on my machine, formatted it... I had a macrium reflect full backup that dated back to 25th of september, so then i restored it and was surprised to see even with ccleaner 5.33 installed, the registry entries that were supposed to be installed with the modified ccleaner were simply not there. Then i remembered that once while downloading ccleaner, i noticed the download speeds to be really slow and two exe's were downloading, so instead of downloading it from piriform servers, i downloaded it from filehippo.com or maybe vice versa, either of the two; so maybe the file on filehippo wasnt effected...