PC Cleaner

PC Cleaner Description

PC Cleaner is a rogue anti-malware utility that pretends to detect and remove spyware, as well as other types of privacy-invading threats from your PC. Like many other little-heard-about anti-malware products, however, PC Cleaner is, in fact, a scamware program that has no real ability to find or get rid of spyware, and serves no purpose besides making it easy for you to send money to its criminal maintainers. In fact, many victims of PC Cleaner have reported that any attempts to use PC Cleaner’s fake features just caused system freezes! SpywareRemove.com malware research team has also connected PC Cleaner to browser redirect attacks and other problems, like program crashes that can make the removal of PC Cleaner a tedious process. However, as long as you follow established safety procedures and use a good anti-malware application to delete PC Cleaner, the long term effects of a PC Cleaner infection on your PC should be nonexistent.

The Dirty Past That PC Cleaner Doesn’t Want You to See

Although normally known as simply PC Cleaner, PC Cleaner also has several aliases that PC Cleaner would prefer to keep hidden, including Backdoor.Win32.UltimateDefender.hu, PCClean, Program:Win32/Pccleaner, Win32/Adwrae.PCClean, Program:Win32/UltimateCleaner and Program:Win32/FakePccleaner. Accurate anti-malware programs may detect PC Cleaner by any one of these labels, although, in most cases, you’ll need to shut PC Cleaner down by using Safe Mode, before your security software will function well enough to delete a PC Cleaner infection.

Although PC Cleaner’s name would be more appropriate to a registry -cleaner, PC Cleaner is marketed as an anti-spyware program that finds and removes PC threats that steal passwords and other forms of private info.

If you install PC Cleaner by accident or on purpose, you’ll soon find that PC Cleaner can’t detect anything, but that will not keep PC Cleaner from making new fake warning messages every few minutes. Examples of common PC Cleaner pop-ups that SpywareRemove.com malware experts have noted include:

Even PC Cleaner itself is only a copy of previous types of rogue anti-spyware programs that were only slightly-altered to appear to be individual products. PC Cleaner clones include PC Clean Pro, Home Antivirus 2010, Advanced Security Tool 2010, Malware Protection, Security Protection and PC Security 2009. These clones of PC Cleaner may also market themselves in variants that use different yearly suffixes or no year-based suffixes at all.

Putting This Dirty Security Program Back to Bed

Even if you’ve learned to ignore PC Cleaner’s fake alerts and avoid spending money on PC Cleaner’s ineffectual PC threat-removal features, SpywareRemove.com malware research team also caution you to beware of other symptoms of a PC Cleaner attack, such as:

Crashes or system freezes when you attempt to use PC Cleaner or a real security program.
Browser redirect attacks that take you to PC Cleaner’s website, pc-cleaner.com, in an attempt to extort money.

The first step to stop PC Cleaner is reboot and switch to Safe Mode to prevent PC Cleaner from interfering with your anti-malware programs, which will be unable to detect and remove all of PC Cleaner’s components until you do this. The second step that SpywareRemove.com malware researchers recommend is to scan your entire PC for all of PC Cleaner’s components, including Registry entries, which should be removed to insure the stability of your operating system. However, if you can accomplish this, you’ll find that your computer is as good as new once PC Cleaner is banished from the premises.

PC Cleaner Automatic Detection Tool (Recommended)

Is your PC infected with PC Cleaner? To safely & quickly detect PC Cleaner, we highly recommend you run the malware scanner listed below.

Download SpyHunter's* Malware Scanner to detect PC Cleaner What happens if PC Cleaner does not let you open SpyHunter or blocks the Internet?

Technical Details

File System Modifications

Tutorials: If you wish to learn how to remove malware components manually, you can read the tutorials on how to find malware, kill unwanted processes, remove malicious DLLs and delete other harmful files. Always be sure to back up your PC before making any changes.

The following files were created in the system:

#	File Name	Detection Count
1	%ProgramFiles%\PC-Cleaner	607
2	Uninstall PC-Cleaner.lnk	600
3	PCCleaner_Installer_eng[1].exe	593
4	Start PC-Cleaner.lnk	548
5	pcsd.dll	541
6	PC-Cleaner.exe	438
7	%AppData%\PC-Cleaner	183

Registry Modifications

Tutorial: To edit and delete registry entries manually, read the tutorial on how to remove malicious registry entries.

Tip & Warning: Editing and removing the wrong registry keys can severely damage your PC, so remember to backup your Windows Registry! To optimize your Windows Registry and speed up your PC, download RegHunter's registry cleaner.

The following newly produced Registry Values are:
HKEY..\..\{Value}SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Approved, value: {59C2348A-4473-471A-B095-6CAEFAF953E8}SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Approved, value: {B4982923-BC21-4CBF-9521-E0CA261F06DD}SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Approved, value: {51F54472-54D9-4634-9791-A3FC5A65F4DF}SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Approved, value: {ABDC6955-BF9F-461C-A0D6-DFB06542C4A0}HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\..{RunKeys}PC-CleanerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\[APPLICATION]\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall..{Uninstaller}PC-Cleaner
The following CLSID's were detected:
HKEY..\..\{CLSID Path} {59C2348A-4473-471A-B095-6CAEFAF953E8}{ABDC6955-BF9F-461C-A0D6-DFB06542C4A0}{51F54472-54D9-4634-9791-A3FC5A65F4DF}{4D6725C5-32F7-4179-B42C-1D10BBE0A0F0}{B4982923-BC21-4CBF-9521-E0CA261F06DD}