The Cleaner Professional: Cleaning Up Malware Contamination Comprehensive Protection from Malware? Joe Moran
In a way, a Windows PC can be a lot like a glass of tap water — everything may look normal on the surface, but a closer examination can reveal all sorts of hidden stuff inside. Often that stuff may be benign, but some of it can also be quite harmful. In water the contaminants may be microbes or chemicals, but on a PC it's malicious software that you need to worry about.
These days there are countless unpleasant programs floating around the Internet looking for systems to infect, and it often seems as if there are almost as many programs that you can employ to help rid your computer of these infections.
The Cleaner Professional from MooSoft is one such program that tries to protect your system against a variety of threats, from spyware to keyloggers to trojans and worms. Like many similar utilities, The Cleaner Professional aims to not only ferret out existing infections but to prevent new ones as well by monitoring the changes that are made to your system. We found that The Cleaner Professional could be helpful in locating, removing, and thwarting infections, but it also suffers from a poor interface design that in many cases requires too much effort from the user.
The Cleaner Professional actually consists of three separate programs. There's the main application that scans your system for problems, and then there are two additional modules called TCActive and TCMonitor, which monitor processes in memory and the Windows Registry (respectively) in the hopes of blocking unauthorized changes and arresting damage before it occurs.
Each piece of the The Cleaner Professional is a stand-alone application that is accessed independently (both TCActive and TCMonitor have their own Windows Tray icons), and while we certainly appreciate The Cleaner Professional's thoroughness, a more integrated interface would be easier to work with than having to go to three different places to use or view the various aspects of the overall program.
System Scanning
We installed The Cleaner Professional on two Windows test systems we knew to be infected and performed a complete scan. The scans identified multiple infections on each system and offered the option to quarantine or delete them, each of which it was able to do successfully. The time necessary to scan the entire system (including hidden files and inside compressed archives) didn't seem inordinately long, though the estimated time remaining counter is too inaccurate to be helpful. (In addition to complete system scans, you can also scan any individual file via a right-click context menu option.)
Unlike some spyware cleaning tools, The Cleaner Professional doesn't flag tracking cookies, which can be troubling but usually doesn't pose a serious risk to a system.
If you want to learn more about a malicious program you just uncovered, you can consult a Trojan database accessible from within The Cleaner Professional. Alas, although the database contains what looks to be hundreds of entries, most of them offer very little information other than the specific category (i.e. adware, dialer, backdoor, etc.) the malware falls under.
Each entry also has a link to MooSoft's online database, which often contains a bit more information, but it's usually nothing more than a cursory description of what the malware does. Ultimately the database isn't as informative as it could be, and there are better resources on the Web for researching the nature of a suspicious program.
A more useful capability is The Cleaner Professional's Stealth Mode, which can randomly change the name of the program's executable files (and removes the program names from Window titles) so that they won't be recognized by malware programs that try to identify and deactivate any defensive programs you have running on your system.
