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How to thwart such surreptitious advertisements?


saurabhdua

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Hello there!

Please suggest on how to keep these surreptitious & insidious adverts at bay ?

Have scoured the "Options" under CCleaner & nothing relevant could be found there !?

What really is causing these to appear at first place ?

Inputs will be sincerely appreciated.

Thanks. 

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The ways I'm aware of to stop these adverts, are to either uninstall, or within whatever firewall you're running, block incoming and outgoing connections for ccleaner.exe & ccleaner64.exe (and perhaps CCupdate.exe, not sure if it's needed). The only potential downside to revoking ccleaner's internet access is it won't be able to check for updates, but personally I suggest using some other app that checks multiple programs for updates anyway (eg PatchMyPC, SUMO, etc. there are a few around, or you can periodically check the home page).

What's causing these adds to appear is now AVAST has the reigns, whenever you start the program, it checks certain servers to see what wonderful things it can try to sell you, and then attempts to nag you into purchasing them by bombarding you with the add presumably in an attempt to wear you down so you submit to make a purchase. (not sure why they chose this method, most mature people know it only serves to annoy and deters you from ever wanting to deal with the offending entity, but I guess some companies like to act like children or are simply too lazy & apathetic to use mechanisms they already have in place which would tell them you've seen the add so not display it any more)

FYI: I'm confident this particular add will stop after 30th of November (since that's when the sale ends) but Christmas is coming so it will more than likely all play out again.

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11 hours ago, Noesis said:

The ways I'm aware of to stop these adverts, are to either uninstall, or within whatever firewall you're running, block incoming and outgoing connections for ccleaner.exe & ccleaner64.exe (and perhaps CCupdate.exe, not sure if it's needed). The only potential downside to revoking ccleaner's internet access is it won't be able to check for updates, but personally I suggest using some other app that checks multiple programs for updates anyway (eg PatchMyPC, SUMO, etc. there are a few around, or you can periodically check the home page).

What's causing these adds to appear is now AVAST has the reigns, whenever you start the program, it checks certain servers to see what wonderful things it can try to sell you, and then attempts to nag you into purchasing them by bombarding you with the add presumably in an attempt to wear you down so you submit to make a purchase. (not sure why they chose this method, most mature people know it only serves to annoy and deters you from ever wanting to deal with the offending entity, but I guess some companies like to act like children or are simply too lazy & apathetic to use mechanisms they already have in place which would tell them you've seen the add so not display it any more)

FYI: I'm confident this particular add will stop after 30th of November (since that's when the sale ends) but Christmas is coming so it will more than likely all play out again.

Aren't there PUPs or PUMs deployed for this very purpose?

Shouldn't apps like 'Malwarebytes' catch hold of such inner/insidious murmurings?

I don't use any firewall as these add to the overall latency of a connection/network.

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The ads don't appear if you turn off your internet connection before opening Ccleaner and if you set Ccleaner not to start on computer start.  Then if you want to check for updates leave the internet connection on occasionally when you use Ccleaner and simply close the advert.

That said, they might create a stealthy process that runs without specific permission and gets the adverts ready for later...

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Yeah, like 2171F says these ads only happen when Ccleaner starts and it has internet access. Naturally not being connected to the internet when Ccleaner launches will stop the ads. Not having it start on windows startup is going to give you control over when the ads appear as you'll manually have to start the program.

Regarding things like PUP's or PUM's, I'm not sure what you mean by them being deployed for this purpose. They are just programs that you (or any user) choose to install but have a reputation for doing unexpected or bad things that they aren't really meant to do (from the perspective of a user). Some are more insidious than others, but most the time the program itself will do what it's meant to do but there is an unknown catch to installing/using them. You could easily view CCleaner as such a program these days considering it's current behavior.

Malwarebytes and other programs like it are designed to check for and warn a user about such programs, and then give you a choice of removing them. Sometimes (but not in ccleaners case) they will simply remove the bad components of a program (so the program will still work, just it won't be able to run the dodgy process it also installed) but other times there is no extra "dodgy" process, it's all self contained within the main program, and it causes undesired behavior so the program itself has to be removed. CCleaner isn't considered a PUP by the creators of these programs, yet, as far as I'm aware, but it may be in the future. The bottom line is CCleaner doesn't use some external third party advertising platform which is what these programs usually detect, when it comes to simply advertising. If CCleaner actually did something more damaging than simply showing an ad whenever it starts, these programs would definitely flag it, as they do with other programs.

Finally what OS are you on, asking as I suspect you don't run a 3rd party firewall, but probably are running one, as all major OS's ship with one these days. (Course you may have disabled it, which I wouldn't recommend, as yes they add a little to latency, but they also add a lot to making your network more secure. The analogy being do you think its a good idea to always leave your doors unlocked because it's quicker to leave & enter without locked doors).

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