Your IT Consultant

CCleaner is Out of Control

September 18, 2018

I have never been a fan of CCleaner. In our experience, the licensing terms are one of the most abused that we have seen in the last decade or so. The licensing terms clearly state that CCleaner is free for PERSONAL use, however, we see it installed in a boatload of business settings. That is clearly a violation of the license terms. Notwithstanding the licensing violations, CCleaner has "gone to the dark side" in the last several months. There was the malware attack where hackers replaced the original version of the software with a malicious version. Next came a major issue where CCleaner collected data from your system without the user's approval. Worst yet, there was no way to opt out. So Avast (now the owner of CCleaner) pulled the version.

The latest fiasco is the automatic update of CCleaner even if you configured the software NOT to automatically update. Apparently, the setting has absolutely no impact and the software will update no matter what. So much for configuration settings. You need to delete the CCupdate.exe file to stop all updates. Sorry, but I don't think anyone should be using CCleaner, which I've said for many years, but that's just my opinion. I'm sure others will disagree, but are they license violators too?

E-mail: Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsimek
https://amazon.com/author/johnsimek
https://www.senseient.com