The CCleaner incident is behind us, but the damage to the development chain and the loss of trust may have done more harm than the malware itself. Searches for alternatives to CCleaner have multiplied, bringing us to BleachBit. This program can be modified to add more cleaners, has a portable edition, and its open source development keeps it free from any nasty surprises in the background.
A Loss of Trust in CCleaner
The latest information on the CCleaner malware infection indicates that the campaign is linked to a Chinese hacking group whose target was a very specific list of corporations. Thanks to the work of teams such as Cisco's Talos Group and Intezer Labs, the impact was much smaller than expected, and it's fair to say (to some extent) that CCleaner is back to normal. Still, it's not hard to understand why some users want to replace it. Fortunately, several cleaners match CCleaner's capabilities, and one of them is BleachBit, which we recommended several years ago.
BleachBit in Practice
The interface remains as simple as ever, which I consider a very positive thing. Its operation holds no mystery: we select the entries to clean, press “Preview” to simulate the process, and if we agree we confirm with “Clean”. The best part is that we can expand the number of options the same way as with CCleaner, but without the need for an external program. BleachBit automatically downloads an updated copy of the winapp2.ini file, although we must enable this first in its Preferences section.
The latest stable version of BleachBit is 1.12, and its newest beta is 1.17. It has an official installer, a portable version with no external dependencies, several updated packages for Linux depending on the distro (the copies in the official repositories are not up to date), and preliminary macOS support. Finally, anyone who wants to download the code and work on a port aimed at another platform can do so without restrictions.
