Update: TeamViewer accounts breached – serious security threat to systems

Serious security threat to systems, risk reduced by swift, proactive action

Important note and update: Regarding this breach, it is important that our clients understand that activIT systems does not use TeamViewer for remote connections to our client systems, and as such the majority of our clients computers are unaffected by this TeamViewer security issue.

However, a number of our clients are engaged with third party vendors, and TeamViewer is commonly used by those vendors to remotely provide support to line of business applications. Many of these third party vendors access our clients systems whilst those systems are unattended, and many of those systems are server environments. In addition, many people use TeamViewer for casual access to remote computers that they own. It is highly feasible that should one of those systems be breached, our clients would not know about it until it is far too late.

As security is our responsibility, we have taken a proactive approach and implemented a short term security measure to mitigate the risk to our clients by disabling TeamViewer on our clients systems, where we have those systems under our management.

We encourage all clients to liaise with your third party software vendors in order to ensure that they have changed the passwords associated with their TeamViewer accounts; for our clients on our activCare service plan, we will be doing this for you this week.

Original notice issued this morning by activIT systems
It has recently been reported that there have been a large number of TeamViewer users having their computers accessed by unauthorised third parties. It appears that this situation has occurred due to TeamViewer’s systems being breached, with account credentials stolen, thus allowing access to the PCs within the associated account. There have been reports of PCs being accessed and online banking, PayPal and other financial related services having money stolen from within.

To protect our clients from having this happen we have disabled the TeamViewer remote access software on all PCs we have under management to prevent any unauthorised parties being able to gain control of them. If you require the use of this software please contact us to discuss the options available and to allow us to detemine if it is safe for you to use TeamViewer.

More information on TeamViewer accounts is available from here: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/help/410-what-is-a-teamviewer-account-and-how-do-i-sign-up-for-one

News reports from affected users are available here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/teamviewer-users-are-being-hacked-in-bulk-and-we-still-dont-know-how/

A response from TeamViewer regarding the situation is available here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/teamviewer-says-theres-no-evidence-of-2fa-bypass-in-mass-account-hack/

If you have any queries please contact us or phone us on 1300 228 480.