Keylogger

I can't find any suspicious processes running but something strange keeps happening that makes me believe I have a keylogger and malware on my mac. AdobeFlashUpdate just randomly runs and asks me to give admin cred to do the update. Today googlepicasaupdate ran and I closed it and immediately adobeflashupdate popped up. These updates look like they are from adobe and google but I thought updates were only done through Software Update or from within the application. None of these programs were running when they popped up.

When in doubt always go to the developers site ADOBE if there is a legit update it will be there and look at your URL if the address seems suspicious it is.
Apple does not include Flash updates in software update that is up to the user .

The only apps that are updated through Software Update are those included with the operating system.

Have you been to any questionable sites lately? If not, the dialogs you're seeing are probably innocuous but do as osxx suggests and update the applications using the installers from the developer's website. If you do that and the dialogs stop, you'll know they were real. If they continue, come back and we can go from there.

The latest versions of Flash have a System pref and will pop up an update window occasionally.
Google is notorious for it's auto updater - whether you want it to or not.
That being said, there IS malware which mimics the Flash updater and installs trojans.
This is why it is a good idea to install only from Adobe.

Thanks for the replies. I went to adobe and updated through their website. I don't know what version I had but I learned that it is embedded into my browser. So I guess adobe and picasa were running as plugins in my browser when the update prompts came.

I'm still interested in learning how to detect such malware. I have kaspersky antivirus installed but it has never detected anything.

Lucid,
A sound piece of advice is always update anything Adobe related directly from their website and not through some kind of popup.
Same for Java.
Flash and Jave are considered " fair game " for any malware writer and because almost everyone has flash and/or Java on their machine, people have learned to live with these popups, consider it normal behavior and don't think any further.

Cheers ... McBie