Of these 2.27 million users, 40 received a second-stage payload. Piriform worked with law enforcement officials to shut down the server and claimed that over 2.27 million users were affected.

The malware in question was collecting data such as the computer name, IP address, list of installed software, list of active software and list of network adapters from infected machines and transmitting this information to an unknown third party server in USA. These versions of the software had been modified illegally before it was released to the public. On September 12th, 2017, Piriform revealed in a blog post that CCleaner version and CCleaner Cloud version had been compromised. Unless you are an advanced user, using the registry cleaner is not advisable. The windows registry is a database containing settings for virtually everything on your PC, so messing up the registry might have serious consequences. The software does delete temporary files, but deleting some of these files (like the web browser’s cookies and cache files) might actually slow down the computer.Ĭoming to the registry cleaner, this feature is best left unused unless bad registry entries have left your system damaged and programs refuse to launch or install.

Unless your hard disk is running full, using CCleaner might not provide a huge boost in performance. And since every computer comes with much bigger hard disks than they did before anyway, the disk cleanup feature might not prove much useful too. Most of the functionalities CCleaner offers is already built into the Windows operating system, and as such do not require an additional software to accomplish. Since these tools are already built into Windows, most users don’t exploit these functionalities anyway. CCleaner also provides a startup manager, an uninstaller, and a System restore interface. Also, CCleaner cleans up files that have been created by background processes (like cookies and cache) which users do not manually delete. Since anyone with access to these files gains immense information about the user, deleting these files is the easiest way to prevent this. As such, CCleaner can assist in getting rid of cache files and browser cookies which store private data. This is hardly a concern nowadays, given that hard disks come cheaper with greater storage capabilities.

The first use case this definition brings to mind is freeing up memory from the hard disk. CCleaner is a utility program which helps in getting rid of potentially unwanted files and invalid Windows registry entries from a computer.

Dr.cleaner mac vs ccleaner