A LITTLE BACKSTORY ON CCLEANER & LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES

 Ccleaner, originally Crap Cleaner, was founded in 2003 and was quickly one of the world’s most popular cleaning utilities for Windows. Ccleaner made a name for itself, it was well received and was downloaded over two-billion times as of time of writing, according to Piriform. Piriform are the original development team behind such programs like Ccleaner, Defraggler, Speccy, and a few other applications, including a cloud cleaning application for remote access to clients or servers in regards to maintenance. Ccleaner started out rather small offering few other tools than a disk cleaner, but quickly built itself up to include a host of other useful tools. Useful tools that were later included into Ccleaner include: Disk cleanup, registry cleaner, startup manager, addons manager, applications uninstaller, etc. Ccleaner became so popular that it even raised the eyebrows of Avast. Avast is a well known antivirus company in the Czech Republic and was founded circa 1988. As of recently, Avast was hacked specifically for the purpose of embedding a malicious payload within Ccleaner’s code. It was brought to Avast’s attention by Cisco Talos, a company who researches exploits and security vulnerabilities such as these. According to Cisco, version 5.33 was the only one mentioned to have had the malware payload embedded. For a whole month, Avast signed the certificates that allowed this payload to slip by undetected. No one knew that data about them was being returned to the offending domains. It was later determined that the attack was meant for certain companies instead of just random users. The attack was crafted beautifully in that if the primary domain was down, it had alternate domains to use to send the information to the hacker. The program was fixed soon after and users were urged to update their existing Ccleaner to version 5.34 which no longer contained the tainted code. This was the only known breach in history via Ccleaner. What makes this attack so unique is that it even slipped by the very antivirus creators who hosted the software. In fact, this only happened shortly after Avast acquired Piriform. The program is now safe for use and still sports the slightly dated, yet still sleek G.U.I elements, however, I personally never cared for the new monitoring feature being turned on by default. There are a few alternatives, one of the top efforts is actually by Microsoft and comes pre-installed into their OS. Windows 98 through 10 have a form of cleanup tool built in, it’s not much, but it does get the job done, and it has been improving with each big release. There are still others who have made similar strides in regards to Ccleaner, one of which I personally recommend, Bleachbit. Bleachbit was originally designed with Linux users in mind, but later became prevalent on Windows systems as well. Bleachbit for Windows does not scan the registry and other sensitive areas, more advanced cleaning parameters can be added via .ini file like with Ccleaner. Bleachbit does clean a bit more and is a lot like Ccleaner only open source. Didn’t mention one you use? You can post them in the comments.