Calling the tactic "malware at its worst," Lavasoft said its privacy software is being silently deleted when users install a third-party multimedia player.
It has been confirmed that installing RadLight version 3.03 deletes Lavasoft"s Ad-Aware program, as promised in a warning in the software"s 1,100-word license agreement.
According to the RadLight Web site, RadLight is an application developed to offer fast and high-quality playback of DivX content and other multimedia files.
Lavasoft spokeswoman Ann Christine Akerlund said the company learned about the RadLight "attack" on Ad-Aware from its customers on Monday and posted a warning on the message board at its site.
"Radlight software indeed checks for the default Ad-aware installation path, and then removes all files that are not currently in use, upon its first execution. Until now, such a malicious behavior was commonly known for viruses and Trojans," read the warning.
Akerlund said Ad-Aware users who have had their program deleted by RadLight must re-install Ad-Aware to restore functionality. Lavasoft was in the process of adding detection for RadLight to a forthcoming reference file update, she said.
Lavasoft notified CNET"s Download.com, which previously offered RadLight, about the issue Monday, according to Akerlund. Today, the multimedia program was no longer available from CNET. According to a copy of the download page cached by the Google search engine, over 750,000 copies of RadLight had been downloaded from CNET as of February 2002.