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Hacker? Virus? Unix Maintenance? What is this?

N

nate

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 28, 2003
61
0
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
I'm on my Powerbook right now, running Tiger, and something strange just happened.

I don't know if this is "normal" or if it's a hacker, virus, or some kind of Unix maintenance. And, I can't seem to find any answers through a google search.

My processor all of a sudden started to work over time, so I checked Activity Monitor.

A process called "Find" was working, user was "nobody."

Afterwards, "Sort" started up, and then "Tr" started up.

I noticed that the blue "%Nice" CPU was up a lot... I have no clue what
"Nice" means in terms of a CPU.

I was wondering why something was trying to "find" and then "sort" my system, which makes me think that maybe it's a Unix thing, and maybe it's part of Spotlight.

However, it said that the User was "Nobody." Which is strange, because I've never seen a user "Nobody" in any other process that's a system process... I usually see root or my user name.


Anybody know what this is? I'm hoping that it's just a system thing and not someone searching my system.


--nate
 
I don't think its anything bad

I've seen the nobody user before so its nothing new or made up, like you said it might have something to do with Spotlight

a Nice process is one which uses few processor power and don't take it off any other proccess, so when your no using your computer the nice proccess will use the CPU
 
Applespider said:
Don't worry. nobody is one of the standard accounts that OS X uses along with ones like daemon etc.
Click to expand...

I remember back when I was young and didn't know much about computers. I met this person online, they gave me their email address, and I tried to email them. I got an email back from MAILER-DAEMON which said "a fatal error has occurred." I thought they were a hacker that was making threats! It scared the crap out of me! haha i'm a little embarrassed to even tell that story now.
 
Chaszmyr said:
I remember back when I was young and didn't know much about computers. I met this person online, they gave me their email address, and I tried to email them. I got an email back from MAILER-DAEMON which said "a fatal error has occurred." I thought they were a hacker that was making threats! It scared the crap out of me! haha i'm a little embarrassed to even tell that story now.
Click to expand...

:D

That's very funny. I'm going to use that one some time.
 
That's the weekly job that kicks in to rebuild the database for the locate command (which is kind of redundant now that we have Spotlight, but...). it's normal.
 
iMeowbot said:
That's the weekly job that kicks in to rebuild the database for the locate command (which is kind of redundant now that we have Spotlight, but...). it's normal.
Click to expand...

locate is much more encompassing than Spotlight, since it indexes all those "hidden" files and folders that Spotlight won't touch.

The built-in locate in OS X drives me nuts though, since it doesn't handle case-insensitive searches. Being a recovering Linux geek, I disabled locate and built slocate instead. It's much nicer not to have to remember exactly which letters in a filename are capitalized.
 
Westside guy said:
locate is much more encompassing than Spotlight, since it indexes all those "hidden" files and folders that Spotlight won't touch.
Click to expand...

Will Spotlight index hidden files if you reveal them?
Even if not, I find it difficult to believe Spotlight couldn't be hacked to index hidden files.
 
Yep, sorry to tell you, but your computer have been hacked, and the hacker installed a virus called "Find" on your computer, which does UNIX maintenance tasks. The only solution is to nuke your computer from orbit.
 
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