Greg's Corner

What the CCleaner hack means to you

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with CCleaner, it’s an app for Windows computers that removes cookies and other temporary files on your computer to free up hard drive space and provide a performance boost. Recently, CCleaner’s developer, Piriform, announced on their blog that certain versions of the CCleaner software had been infected with malware. This malware is said to have possibly infected over 2 million computers.

Piriform is claiming that they were able to quickly resolve the issue and that no harm should come to any of its users. However, it is recommended to update to the latest version of CCleaner if you haven’t already. The ironic part to the story is that Piriform is owned by malware protection company Avast. While no computer may have been actually harmed this has to be at least a minor PR kerfuffle for Avast.

In order to keep your Windows machine more secure, always update to the latest version of whatever software your using. Whenever those pop ups come up asking you to update to the latest version, you should download and install the latest version as it usually means that the software maker has patched some security holes in the software. There are also some great utilities that automatically update your Windows applications for you that you may want to look into.