14 DAY TRIAL // UPDATED: Something happened with TeamViewer's servers on June 1, as all clues pointed to a massive breach after many users went on Reddit and complained about having their computers hacked, some even reporting seeing new purchases in their PayPal accounts.
The problems started around noon, when users weren't able to connect to the TeamViewer network. Then, the company's website also went down, but the team managed to bring it back online a few hours later.
TeamViewer says it's only having technical issues, no security breach
On Twitter, the TeamViewer team wrote that they're only experiencing issues in some parts of their network, but they denied any security breach, at least on their side. The company later addressed this issue in a statement to Softpedia saying their DNS server suffered a DDoS attack.
About the same time this was happening, some users complained on Redit about finding new transactions in their PayPal accounts while others have discovered someone had been poking around their email account.
Some luckier users say they barely avoided getting hacked at the last minute, noticing their mouse started to move across the screen and hurrying to disconnect from the Internet. We've attached more screenshots of some of the user complaints as reference.
Crooks have used TeamViewer for malicious purposes before
It is strange that, this time around, just when TeamViewer servers go down, multiple users also flock to social media to complain about getting hacked.
TeamViewer's issues and the user complaints may be just a big cosmic coincidence, but the large numbers of mega breaches that contained passwords may also be a clue why these people are getting hacked, as security researcher Troy Hunt noted. Just recently, the FBI issued a public alert regarding ransom emails received by the people that had their data exposed in these breaches. It is entirely possible that TeamViewer users that reused the same password across services to have had issues.
In the past months, we've seen malware use TeamViewer many times to infect computers, but most of those cases were because of users who used weak passwords, which is certainly not TeamViewer's fault.
Some of these cases include the Surprise ransomware, a new type of tech support scam, and most recently the BackDoor.TeamViewer.49 trojan that loads TeamViewer in order to set up a Web proxy on infected computers.
Softpedia has been in contact with TeamViewer during the previous reports, and the company has told us they'll provide a statement once they manage to get their entire network back online.
UPDATE: The TeamViewer team issued a statement regarding the recent incindent. The article above was also heavily updated to factor in the new available information. Below are the TeamViewer statements, which are also available in full here:
"TeamViewer experienced a service outage on Wednesday, June 1, 2016. The outage was caused by a denial-of-service attack (DoS) aimed at the TeamViewer DNS-Server infrastructure. TeamViewer immediately responded to fix the issue to bring all services back up.
"Some online media outlets falsely linked the incident with past claims by users that their accounts have been hacked and theories about would-be security breaches at TeamViewer. We have no evidence that these issues are related.
"Even though the server outage is not in any way related to the below mentioned advice, TeamViewer would like to reaffirm:
"Careless use of account credentials remains to be a key problem for all internet services. This particularly includes the use of the same password across multiple user accounts with various internet services.
"In addition, users might unintentionally download and install malware programs. Yet once a system is infected, perpetrators can virtually do anything with that particular system – depending on how intricate the malware is, it can capture the entire system, seize or manipulate information, and so forth."
