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Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

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Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#32

There has been a number of cases of installers from trusted developers being infected lately. (For example Transmission being infected twice...) On our side (developers) we need to be careful with this idea that "we will know" when something is wrong and be more careful when deploying software. It would also be nice if some form of tool could be used to test a binary to make sure it only contains what it should conta…

I'm not sure how exactly these infections work, but one method would be to infect the developers' PCs. In which case you essentially can't trust anything. You'd need some kind of byzantine fault tolerance (mandatory multi-person code review?) to be sure nothing like this ever happens What makes this scary is that, as far as I know, pretty much no software has that kind of security, and there are several pieces of wid…

The solution would be code review + reproducable builds. This is how Debian tries to prevent these kinds of attacks.

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#34
post #27

As a kid, the only OS I was aware of was Windows. Once, my computer was infected to the point where it was almost unusable. A more experienced friend suggested a non-free antivirus and the CCleaner. After a lot of effort, I could get my machine back to working, but it became so slow that it led me to discover Linux. Now, on a Windows 10 machine, I’ve nothing but Defender, and since the aforementioned experience I’ve…

Years ago I used to use CCleaner and their disk defragmentor tool. Now I too am on Windows 10 and use neither, still it's sad to see this sort of thing happen to what I remember being decent free software.

IIRC, CCleaner used to come with some unnecessary stuff that caught users unawares.

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#35

As a kid, the only OS I was aware of was Windows. Once, my computer was infected to the point where it was almost unusable. A more experienced friend suggested a non-free antivirus and the CCleaner. After a lot of effort, I could get my machine back to working, but it became so slow that it led me to discover Linux. Now, on a Windows 10 machine, I’ve nothing but Defender, and since the aforementioned experience I’ve…

> it led me to discover Linux

As someone who is the same boat but hasn't discovered Linux yet, how hard would you say it would be to install a version of Linux that support 3 monitors (using an onboard ATI card and a PCIe card)? Last time I tried installing it this is the part I gave up at.

Also as a person always been aware of Window I find the graphics in Ubuntu lacking some finesse, i.e. the scrollbars, window panes look like that created using Java applets (granted it is a matter of taste and personal choice) but what is the most professional looking desktop to try right now?

Sorry i know this is off-topic but I too really want to switch from windows and don't want to waste money in Macbooks so any advice would be appreciated.

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#36

There has been a number of cases of installers from trusted developers being infected lately. (For example Transmission being infected twice...) On our side (developers) we need to be careful with this idea that "we will know" when something is wrong and be more careful when deploying software. It would also be nice if some form of tool could be used to test a binary to make sure it only contains what it should conta…

That creates an interesting conflict between automatic updates (you want to be patched against the latest security vulnerabilities) and manual, more infrequent updates (you are less exposed to a compromised update directly and automatically infecting your machine).

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#37

There has been a number of cases of installers from trusted developers being infected lately. (For example Transmission being infected twice...) On our side (developers) we need to be careful with this idea that "we will know" when something is wrong and be more careful when deploying software. It would also be nice if some form of tool could be used to test a binary to make sure it only contains what it should conta…

First of all, this is why reproducible builds (getting bit-for-bit identical binaries independent of the machine used to build the software) is something we should be putting much more work into. The Debian folks are doing an amazing job there.

Another important point is that distributions have already solved effectively all of these problems. We have automated building and signing systems that mean that installation and upgrades are done in ways that are not vulnerable even to fairly sophisticated attacks. You can build packages locally if you want to verify them, and modifying a package after it has been built invalidates the signature that all modern package managers require before installing a package. As part of the openSUSE project we even have a free-to-use (and free as in freedom) build project called the Open Build Service[1] which allows you to build packages (with automated dependency update rebuilds) for many different distributions (Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and obviously openSUSE and SLES).

I get that distributions aren't "sexy" but it's getting quite frustrating seeing all these communities make the same mistakes that distributions made (and learned from) more than 20 years ago.

[Disclaimer: I work for SUSE and am an openSUSE community member.]

[1]: https://build.opensuse.org/

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#38
post #33

"CCleaner is an application that allows users to perform routine maintenance on their systems ." It's 2017, how is this still a thing?

I don't understand the question. Maintenance will always be a thing, carried out by humans, cron, or the os itself doesn't really matter.

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#39
post #22

So it was only the 32-bit executable that was affected? By default CCleaner installs both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, however on 64-bit systems it only runs the 64-bit executable and points every shortcut it makes to the 64-bit executable. On one of my affected systems that appears to have had 5.33 installed, I noticed no registry keys that appear to be created and that system never ran the 32-bit executable. Wou…

According to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274517

This blog post from Piriform has more details: http://www.piriform.com/news/release-announcements/2017/9/18...

Basically they believe it was only the 32-bit installer that was compromised.

Re: Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33

#40

As a kid, the only OS I was aware of was Windows. Once, my computer was infected to the point where it was almost unusable. A more experienced friend suggested a non-free antivirus and the CCleaner. After a lot of effort, I could get my machine back to working, but it became so slow that it led me to discover Linux. Now, on a Windows 10 machine, I’ve nothing but Defender, and since the aforementioned experience I’ve…

> it led me to discover Linux As someone who is the same boat but hasn't discovered Linux yet, how hard would you say it would be to install a version of Linux that support 3 monitors (using an onboard ATI card and a PCIe card)? Last time I tried installing it this is the part I gave up at. Also as a person always been aware of Window I find the graphics in Ubuntu lacking some finesse, i.e. the scrollbars, window pan…

Um what did you install? Personally I have been an OpenSUSE guy for almost 10 years now. I would be surprised that you would have a problem. Ubuntu should also be found.

Stay away from Fedora and Arch unless you don't mind getting into some set up files. Personally it is fun getting things setup for me and so I enjoy Arch and Fedora and sometimes it they are just as quick and simple as OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.

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