Piriform (company)


Piriform Ltd is a British software company based in London, owned since 2017 by Avast. It has long developed cleaning and optimisation software for Microsoft Windows, and later macOS and Android operating systems. The name Piriform means "shaped like a pear," possibly referring to the British slang to go pear-shaped.
Piriform tools include CCleaner, Defraggler, Recuva and Speccy. On 22 September 2015, Piriform launched CCleaner Cloud, to maintain computers remotely.
CCleaner was launched in 2004 by founders Guy Saner and Lindsey Whelan. In July 2017 the company was acquired by Avast.
In September 2017, researchers discovered that CCleaner was compromised by hackers who inserted a backdoor into the software, enabling remote access of infected machines.

CCleaner

CCleaner has the option to clean computer browser software including Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Firefox as well as a computer system's temporary files. It has a separate tab to clean the registry. CCleaner's other tools include editing and uninstalling programs, editing the operating system's startup apps and the editing of browser plugins. It can analyse hard disks individually to determine which files are taking the most space. It can search for duplicate files to help reduce drive storage space. It allows one to quickly access system restore points, and it can wipe clean the free space on individual drives to completely remove deleted files.