![]() 12, when it detected suspicious activity and "immediately started an investigation process," including contacting law enforcement. ![]() Vlcek said the company has fully resolved the issue and "believe no harm was done to any of the CCleaner users." He said the company started an investigation on Sept. He said, "no other Piriform or Avast products were affected." In an email statement to CRN, Avast EVP and CTO Ondrej Vlcek said the update only affected older versions of the company’s Piriform CCleaner software, including Piriform CCleaner v and CCleaner Cloud v. It recommended users running older versions of the software manually update their software to the latest version, which currently is version 5.34. The free version of the CCleaner software does not update automatically, the blog post said. The affected version is no longer available for download on the CCleaner site. 11, after which a new version of the software was released (version 5.34). The report said the malicious version was hosted on the servers for download as recently as Sept. Researchers at Cisco Talos, who discovered the hack, said in a blog post that the attack used the download servers to distribute a multistage malware payload alongside the installation of some versions of the CCleaner software.Ĭisco Talos said the attack affected CCleaner version 5.33, which was launched Aug. You can use Windows cleaning options and other third-party tools that do a better job at tasks like finding duplicate files.Hack Of Avast's CCleaner Application Highlights Growing Challenge Around Supply Chain AttacksĬCleaner, an application distributed by security company Avast that helps users perform routine maintenance on systems, has been compromised, according to a report Monday, allowing hackers to distribute a malware payload through the legitimate software. If you rarely run low on disk space, only use one browser, and don't mind updating software manually, then there's really no need for you to use it. So whether you should use CCleaner depends on your needs. And some CCleaner tools, like Uninstall and Startup, just duplicate Windows functionality and are thus of little use. TreeSize is a much better disk analyzer and Patch My PC is better at updating software. Many of these are free and often do a better job than CCleaner.įor example, Windows's Disk Cleanup handles a lot of what CCleaner's cleaning tools do. However, you can access a lot of CCleaner's features in other utilities and software. And the Drive Wiper and Software Updater (if you pay for Pro) are useful. For instance, if you use multiple browsers, it's convenient to remove temporary files from all of them at once. To be fair, there is some use to CCleaner. Software Updater is another panel for accessing the function mentioned above. The Uninstall tab duplicates the methods for uninstalling provided in Windows, though it does make it easy to save all your installed programs to a text file. Here you'll find several additional utilities of varying usefulness. Rounding out CCleaner's feature set is the Tools tab. Microsoft's official statement on Registry cleaners recommends staying away from them don't even bother with this feature of CCleaner. While most people regard CCleaner's Registry cleaner as better than other random ones online, you still don't need to use it. In fact, if a Registry cleaner is too zealous, it can actually cause more problems than it solves. While orphaned entries and other minor problems do occur in the Registry over time, there is no good evidence that cleaning the Registry will speed up your computer. This section is simple: you don't need to use Registry cleaners. ![]() But now, are these problems cleaned up? And further, is CCleaner even worth using?Ĭheck everything you're interested in cleaning and hit Analyze to see how much space your action will save. Have a look at our guide to replacing CCleaner for more history and information.Īll of these factors made it feel more like an unwanted program than something that benefits your computer. On top of this, CCleaner's free version regularly nags you to upgrade to the paid version. That update also made CCleaner difficult to close through standard methods.įinally, in 2018 the app also started ignoring users' preference to disable automatic updates. This is fairly standard, but the problem was that when you turned the setting off, it re-enabled itself upon a reboot. Later, the company introduced an "Active Monitoring" feature that collected anonymized data about your usage. The 32-bit app version on CCleaner's website was hacked, adding a Trojan to the download, which the company thankfully caught before it became widespread. In case you're not familiar, CCleaner's issues started in 2017 shortly after developer Piriform was bought by Avast. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |