New, uninvited "buddy"?

[Gawinda]

Hello! One day last week when Ccat opened I had a new "buddy" in my list - without asking me first. In my first panic I deleted it from the list, then uninstalled Ccat and reinstalled from the same setup files. No new buddy has appeared since.

I became still more concerned when I then restarted my computer and got a message from WinDefender that a threat had been found. It was the infected CCleaner 5.33 installer which I had downloaded in Aug. 2017. I took the steps recommended by Windows 10 Defender Antivirus and no more threats were found since.

Could these two events be connected? The malware attached to CCleaner also has encrypting and sending capabilities (http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/09/avast-distributes-malware.html), could the attackers have accessed Ccat somehow? Thanks for looking into it!