In September 2017 Piriform, the company behind CCleaner, reported a hacker attack affecting those 32-bit Windows users who have either version 5.33.6162 of the program or version 1.07.3191 of CCleaner Cloud installed on their PCs. An independent investigation found out that there was a ‘backdoor’ hidden deep inside the program’s coding that targeted computers of large corporations. Although the critical phase of the attack lasted only four days – between September 12 and 16 – at least 20 of these corporate devices were successfully compromised by the hackers.
To make the hacking even more threatening, the investigation also discovered that the compromised PCs were part of a target list which included devices owned by HTC, Intel, Samsung, Cisco, Sony, VMWare, Microsoft, and many others. Moreover, the attack was so carefully perpetrated that its complex coding and execution allowed the malware to directly infect a computer’s memory – without having to be written in the disk – thus making it harder to be detected and removed.
‘Thankfully’ only two specific versions of CCleaner were involved in the attack, therefore users running the latest versions should be out of trouble. However, this raised the question of whether CCleaner is safe or not, and as a direct consequence, people started to look for alternatives to the compromised software – including the following three:
ZookaWare PC Cleaner is a certified Microsoft partner, which means that the software works exclusively on Windows computers. Its name may indicate a simple computer cleaning solution, but the program is actually closer to a complete PC optimization tool. In fact, not only it allows you to detect and remove registry errors but it also looks for other possible PC-killers like DLL errors, tracking cookies in browsers and more. In addition, users are free to give customized commands to ZookaWare PC Cleaner, making the program search and eliminate only real threats against a computer’s health.
Although the supposedly unlimited time free version only allows to perform scans, the annual license for a single computer costs no more than $2.50 per month, which can be further reduced to only $0.99 per month by purchasing a license for multiple computers.
Uniblue is one of the most iconic computer optimization software developers with solutions for pretty much anything. Although the company favors another product, PowerSuite, its PC optimizer, PC Mechanic, is a reliable option for those who simply want to search for computer vulnerabilities and fix them, or let the program do that automatically by scheduling the scans. Despite having an eerily striking resemblance to SpeedUpMyPC, another Uniblue product, PC Mechanic definitely lives up to its twin brother by providing super fast scanning and file removal.
Uniblue PC Mechanic is available in one subscription plan that costs $39.95 per year, but if you need the program performing scans only, you can enjoy it for free forever.
Registry Reviver is a product of ReviverSoft, a company dedicated to creating outstanding Windows and Mac system optimization products. And outstanding Registry Reviver is, as it’s not a simple registry cleaner, but an immense set of computer optimization tools. With this software users can edit scanning patterns, add important items to an exclusion list, customize the repair function, and much more. Registry Reviver is pretty reliable as well, as not even deep scans influence the overall performance of the computer, plus it doesn’t slow down other programs when it’s doing its job.
Paid subscriptions start from $29.99 per year or $2.49 per month, but you can also enjoy the software for free for as long as you wish and fix up to 25 issues.
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