Poisoned CCleaner

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This fake, “a cracked version of CCleaner Professional”, steals vital information:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/poisoned-ccleaner-search-results-spread-information-stealing-malware/

On permanent hiatus {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender
offline▸ Acer TravelMate P215-52 RAM8GB Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1265 x64 i5-10210U SSD Firefox106.0 MicrosoftDefender
online▸ Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1992 x64 i5-9400 RAM16GB HDD Firefox116.0b3 MicrosoftDefender

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lmacri, Alex5723

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I use ccPortable.

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Does that include the nine Professional features?

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b wrote:

Does that include the nine Professional features?

Which 9 Professional features?

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Performance Optimizer, Driver Updater, Software Updater, Real-time Monitoring, Scheduled Cleaning etc.

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ccPortable has none and I am glad it doesn’t. I wouldn’t trust it with Performance “snake oil” Optimizer, driver updates, software updates…
It is portable app so no Real-time Monitoring, Scheduled Cleaning etc.

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bbearren

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Little relevance to the first post then.

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ccFree also doesn’t include any of the “Pro” features (difference between Free and Portable is Free uses an installer/uninstaller.)

b wrote:

Does that include the nine Professional features?

The chart on the CCleaner versions download page, only shows a total of 6 differences between Free/Portable and Pro (8 if you compare it to Pro+ which has 2 more features than Pro), so exact where did you come up with nine features for Pro

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I see 9 features in total for the Pro version. 
@alejr, your being confused with ‘difference’

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You’re right Matador, my bad for not noticing that.

So the real answer to the question would be, the free/portable version has 3 of the Pro version features.

Strange thing is, my “free” version (5.91.9537) does include another 4 features that are listed as only available in the Pro version (Optimizer, Cleaner, Clear History & Software Updater) although there do seem to be some differences in how they actually operate.

Optimizer can only be run manually.

Cleaner can’t be “scheduled” to run and Clear History doesn’t “automatically run” when the browser is closed, you have to run them manually (although they can be set to run one-time at Windows start.)

As for the “Software updater” option (it’s shown under Tools), because I have a firewall rule in place to prevent CCleaner from making outgoing connections to the internet (to stop telemetry from being sent to Avast), it doesn’t work (it generates an It seems like you’re offline error.)

Back when it was still owned by Piriform, it wasn’t blocked (didn’t include telemetry back then) and that option worked — although I only ever used it to see if any updates were available, not to install them.

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The bottom of the “About Us” page on the  above-cited CCleaner Versions Download page still refers to Piriform.

Zig

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The same Piriform team still maintains CCleaner, but Avast bought them back in 2017 (Avast Buys Piriform, the company behind CCleaner and Recuva) and there have been a bunch of changes to the product since then — some good and, IMHO,  some bad.

The two I found most objectionable were the addition of telemetry reporting back to a set of “Avast” IP addresses and the addition of pop-up ads for other “Avast” products whenever you use it (both of which I blocked using an “outbound” firewall rule.)

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ccPortable 6.19.10858

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ccPortable 6.21.10918

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ccPortable 6.23.11010

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ccPortable 6.24.11060

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Alex, you’ve been Off-topic here since Reply #1.

Are you trying to kill off CCleaner/ccPortable?

If not, please create a new Topic instead of intermittently bumping this Poisoned one.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Bob99, Alex5723, PKCano

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FWIW, I get Ccleaner free directly from the Ccleaner site, not Portableapps.com.  Not intended as a dig against Portableapps.com.

https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds

Desktop mobo Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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SueW

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