Just wanted to put up a short blog post before calling it a day. The post is about an adware called CloudGuard or CloudScout. If the CloudGuard adware is running on your system, you will see CloudGuard.exe in the Windows Task Manager, a new service called CloudScout starting the CloudGuard.exe process and name servers changed to 31.168.224.100 and 5.135.12.56. The software appears as CloudScout Parental Control in the Add/Remove programs dialog.

I’ll show how to remove CloudGuard in this blog post with the FreeFixer removal tool.

I’ve upload CloudGuard.exe to VirusTotal, but it was not detected by any of the scanners there. They probably will in the future.

CloudGuard is distributed by a strategy called bundling. Bundling means that a piece of software is included in other software’s installers. When I first found CloudGuard, it was bundled with a software download called FastPlayerPro. Here’s a screenshot from the cloudguard.me web site which shows the software is adware:

Generally, you can avoid bundled software such as CloudScout / CloudGuard by being careful when installing software and declining the bundled offers in the installer.

I’m sure you’d like to remove CloudScout, and that’s straightforward with FreeFixer. Select the CloudGuard files and settings, as shown in the screen dumps below, click Fix, and reboot your computer and the problem should be gone.

Check the CloudScout/CloudGuard.exe service for removal:

and the CloudGuard.exe process:

And restore your name server:

Hope that helped you with the removal.

Any idea how you got CloudGuard on your machine? Please share in the comments below. Thanks!

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for reading.

Update 2014-11-19: Now the DNS is changed to 31.168.224.106 and 5.135.12.52.