Facepalm: System cleansing app CCleaner has made the headlines fairly a bit over the previous few years, however most of it hasn’t been good publicity. Keeping with that development, one consumer just lately discovered that deleting it from his PC additionally erased most of his different packages. Owner Avast has acknowledged the difficulty can occur in some circumstances and is engaged on a repair.
Reddit consumer rounakr94 (by way of BetaNews) earlier this week wrote that after they deleted CCleaner 5.91 from their PC, they observed within the progress bar that some MSI, Steam, and Origin information had been being additionally being eliminated. Once the method was full, Adobe reader, Afterburner, Aida64, Steam, Origin, Discord, HDsentinel, and extra had been all corrupted, although not uninstalled utterly.
rounakr94 then spent two hours reinstalling the deleted software program and totally scanning his PC for any indicators of malware—an motion you’ll probably absorb such a scenario.
The scan got here again clear. Another consumer enquired the place CCleaner had been put in, to which rounakr94 replied that it had been on the D: drive, the identical drive the place the deleted/corrupted packages had resided.
A developer on the Piriform Forums stated: “CCleaner needs to be eradicating all the pieces from its set up listing is, beneath regular circumstances, precisely what you’ll need CCleaner to be doing. Not simply the information from its unique set up manifest however any updates, log information, and so on in order that it doesn’t depart any traces of itself behind.”
That clearly did not appease rounakr94, who complained that such motion resembles both dangerous coding or easy revenge ways for eradicating CCleaner.
Avast has now acknowledged that in some circumstances, deleting CCleaner can take away different packages not related to the app.
“CCleaner’s default conduct when put in is to create a brand new ‘CCleaner’ folder, so on the level of uninstall, all the pieces in that folder will be deleted with out difficulty. In the case described on this article, a consumer would wish to intentionally bypass this conduct and both select to put in CCleaner to a folder they presently use for different functions or later use the ‘CCleaner’ folder for one thing aside from its supposed use,” stated an Avast spokesperson.
The firm is now engaged on an replace to stop related incidents from taking place once more.
CCleaner hasn’t obtained a lot optimistic protection because it was acquired from Piriform by Avast for $1.3 billion in 2017, the identical 12 months malware was found lurking within the app. There had been the privateness points in 2018 that noticed the energetic monitoring function flip itself again on even after customers disabled it; complaints that CCleaner was putting in Avast anti-virus with out permission; and Windows Defender flagging the free model of the device as a Potentially Unwanted Application (PUA).
