'In today's connected world, it's all about speed and high performance, and with Piriform's robust technology we can address this need perfectly. They are both known by advanced users as focused on performance, so we believe there will be a great interest from our CCleaner customers in using Avast security products and vice versa,' said Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast. Avast and CCleaner are the top two downloaded products on popular download sites. 'We see many commonalities between CCleaner and Avast, allowing for great new products for our user bases.

The company also offers the Avast Cleanup system optimization utility. Much like it did with AVG TuneUp when Avast acquired AVG last year, CCleaner will continue to operate as a standalone service - nothing is likely to change for users. The British firm is also behind other pieces of successful software, such as file recovery program Recuva, system information tool Speccy, and defragger/optimizer Defraggler. Today, a Piriform product is installed over 23 million times each month. In November last year, the company announced that the utility had been downloaded over 2 billion times.

Piriform makes a number of device performance optimization programs, though it's best known for CCleaner, which is used by 130 million people, including 15 million Android users. The move cements Avast's place at the top of the anti-malware industry, where its market share is around 20 percent.

Now, the Czech company has acquired Piriform, the UK-based firm behind popular system-cleaning tool CCleaner.īoth companies announced the deal on their respective websites, but the terms of the acquisition were not revealed. It's been over a year since security software giant Avast purchased rival AVG Technologies for $1.3 billion, bringing its total user numbers to around 400 million.

Speccy malware