Last week, I started seeing a whole new kind of spam on my PC. System messages like this one started showing up on my screen at strange times. They look like Windows systems messages, but they were always advertising something.

I ran the version of Ad Aware that I had installed on my machine, but it didn’t find anything. So I uninstalled AIM, thinking maybe that was the root of the problem. (And besides: why use AIM when there’s Trillian around?). But that didn’t clear up the issue. Over the past couple days, I started getting the messages more frequently…at least once a day.

Then I realized that it had been six months since I installed Ad Aware, and that there were probably new updates. Which there were. When I ran Ad Aware this morning (after being greeted almost immediately after booting up by a spamming system message), it found 14 different spyware programs on my beloved PC. Most of them were Brilliant Digital’s handiwork, which you can read about here. I had installed (and then uninstalled) KaZaa two months ago, but I guess Brilliant Digital is a “sleeper” program that “detonates” weeks after being installed. And I guess uninstalling KaZaa doesn’t uninstall Brilliant Digital’s programs. Lovely.

Moral of the story: Go download the latest version of Ad Aware. Even if you downloaded it just a few months ago, reinstall it. Then run it. Then be horrified. I thought I ran a pretty tight ship over here (I’ve got extensive virus protection, and scan with Ad Aware weekly), but evidently I was wrong.