TeamViewer outage sparks hacking claims which the company denies

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TeamViewer went offline for a number of hours yesterday afternoon, an event which reportedly coincided with users seeing their PCs compromised – although the company denies any connection here, and insists it hasn't been hacked as many users have claimed.

Following yesterday's outage, a number of TeamViewer users went online to complain about having their machines breached. As The Register reports, some folks actually observed attackers taking control of the mouse cursor, and in some cases where able to take action to prevent damage.

However, others weren't so lucky and found that PayPal and other accounts had been accessed and financial havoc wreaked.

On Twitter, TeamViewer's tech support apologised for the outage and any inconvenience caused, but the company denied that any security breach had taken place.

In a statement from the firm's PR department, TeamViewer said that it wasn't hacked and that the application is fully safe to use.

Poor password practices

As for the cause of the compromises reported by users, TeamViewer said that was down to "careless use", and specifically the reuse of passwords across multiple online accounts (suggesting that attackers used a password gleaned elsewhere from another breach).

The TeamViewer statement read: "There is no evidence to suggest that TeamViewer has been hacked. Neither do we have any information that would suggest that there is a security hole in TeamViewer. Therefore it is important to stress there are no TeamViewer hackers, but rather data thieves that will steal information from other sources."

The Register has heard whispers that there may have been some sort of sophisticated DNS hijacking plan enacted by cybercriminals to hoover up TeamViewer login details, but the company clearly isn't accepting that anything like this occurred.

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