It provides a more in-depth cleaning and offers additional tools, such as automatic software updates, removing ad trackers, and more. What is the benefit of the CCleaner Professional?ĬCleaner Professional unlocks several features that you can’t use with the freemium license. Once this is complete your system will be able to run faster and you’ll have more space on your hard drive. You’ll want to make sure you know what you are doing before you proceed with these advanced features.ĬCleaner is a utility that will clean your computer of junk it doesn’t need. Therefore, before that action can be done, there is a pop-up window that will open with a warning.
However, there are some more advanced features, such as the Registry Cleaner, that can do real harm to your computer if used incorrectly. The basic features of CCleaner are simple enough and anyone can run the scans regardless of their technical background. The official CCleaner file is safe to download and doesn’t come with any added software during the installation process. It does have some limitations which can be resolved by purchasing the professional package.
Williams said Talos detected the issue at an early stage, when the hackers appeared to be collecting information from infected machines, rather than forcing them to install new programs.
The nature of the attack code suggests that the hacker won access to a machine used to create CCleaner, Williams said.ĬCleaner does not update automatically, so each person who has installed the problematic version will need to delete it and install a fresh version, he said. Its primary function is to remove invalid path references from your system’s registry.
A new, uncompromised version of CCleaner was released the same day and a clean version of CCleaner Cloud was released on 15 September, it said. CCleaner’s system utility suite consists of four main components: CCleaner is, above all, a registry cleaner. Piriform said Avast, its new parent company, had uncovered the attacks on September 12. It did not disclose how many users were affected.
It advised users of CCleaner v and CCleaner Cloud v to download new versions. In a blog post, Piriform confirmed that two programmes released in August were compromised. “There is nothing a user could have noticed,” Williams said, noting that the optimization software had a proper digital certificate, which means other computers automatically trust the program. Talos researcher Craig Williams said it was a sophisticated attack since it penetrated an established and trusted supplier in a manner similar to June’s “ NotPetya” attack on companies that downloaded infected Ukrainian accounting software. At the time of the acquisition, the company said 130 million people used CCleaner.Ī version of CCleaner downloaded in August included remote administration tools that tried to connect to several unregistered web pages, presumably to download additional unauthorized programs, security researchers at Cisco’s Talos unit said. It cleans up junk programmes and advertising cookies to speed up devices.ĬCleaner is the main product made by London’s Piriform, which was bought in July by Prague-based Avast, one of the world’s largest computer security vendors.
The malicious program was slipped into legitimate software called CCleaner, which is downloaded for personal computers and Android phones as often as 5 million times a week.