Strange processes - what are these?

[Jalopy]

My first post. Thanks for reading.

These strange processes show up in my Process Viewer (OS 10.2.8) but just for a few seconds then they disappear only to show up again later. The attached image is a compiled list of these processes. One or two of these show up at a time. Any idea what they are?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What Mac do you have?
Do they also appear in another, even temporarily created, user account?

 

[Damo01]

look like a bug...

 

[Jalopy]

I have an old eMac (1 GHz PowerPC G4 384 mb). But I just recently looked at the Process Viewer so hence my question about these processes in the old system. Similar strange processes also show up in another user account. Is this a bug or malware or ?

 

[Makosuke]

I can't remember ever seeing anything like that before. You said a compiled list; when they usually appear, do they show ??? under User like that? And what kind of %CPU do they normally show? Zero and impossible numbers like that, or something more reasonable?

Another thing to check is the Real Memory column, which I don't think is shown by default but can be turned on (at least, I think it could--it's been a long time since I did anything with 10.2).

 

[Jalopy]

The User shows up as ??? and the % CPU and % Memory show up as listed in the original post. The strange thing about these processes is that they only appear for a few seconds at a time. Any idea if malware would show up in process viewer like this?

 

[Makosuke]

Malware would almost certainly show up somewhere in process viewer--it would have to be operating at a very low level to avoid being listed when showing processes from all users.

However, I'd normally expect malware to show up with some innocuous process name, in order to not draw attention to itself--I wouldn't expect garbage process names.

That combined with the impossible CPU and Memory numbers (I'd expect malware to just show reasonable values0, and (most importantly) the fact that to my knowledge there simply is no MacOS malware that will run on 10.2, make me think that it's either some kind of OS-level corruption or just a bug.

I can't think of any easy way to test for that apart from an OS reinstall, though.

 

[Jalopy]

Thanks for all your replies.