The summer of scams continues full swing with users of the remote access tool Teamviewer as the latest targets. Social media was abuzz late yesterday with reports of Paypal accounts being drained, email accounts being compromised and unauthorized purchases being made on Amazon and eBay, with many users speculating that TeamViewer itself had been hacked. The TeamViewer website also suffered an outage of around 3 hours, leaving users unable to connect to their PC's remotely. The company was quick to respond on their website stating that "the source of the problem, according to our research, is careless use, not a potential security breach on TeamViewer’s side." It was further stated that the website outage was due to a unrelated DNS issue and denial-of-service attack. Some users had reported seeing a Windows malware called webbrowserpassview.exe showing up in their logs, indicating that the scammers were possibly using a variety of methods to gain entry into the victim's computers.

Company representatives recommended the affected users do the following, as posted on their website:

"TeamViewer encourages users to …

… create different passwords for each account
… not share your passwords.
… change passwords regularly.
… not use personally identifiable information for passwords.
… use two factor authentication: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/help/402-How-do-I-activate-deactivate-two-factor-authentication-for-my-TeamViewer-account.aspx
… use password safes.

More information about these recommendations are available at:
https://www.teamviewer.com/en/company/press/teamviewer-brings-about-rule-of-five-to-celebrate-world-password-day/

TeamViewer recommends that users who have been the victim of criminal activities get in touch with their local police departments, in order to report their case. This is particularly important because TeamViewer is subject to very strict data protection and privacy regulations, and can release sensitive data only to authorized individuals and authorities."