Strange Processes

[Michaelgtrusa]

I have seen these processes in activity monitor that i've never seen before. They are Helpd and safari web content. Has anyone else seen these?

 

[Madd the Sane]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Safari Web Content is part of WebKit2, I believe. As for helpd, I don't know: maybe help indexing?

 

[Aniday]

Safari Web Content is something new in Lion for security. It sandboxes website scripts like javascript and flash. If someone was to insert a malware script in a website they can no longer do whatever they want with you once exploiting whatever vulnerability it was.

Helpd is for the help menu of apps... I think.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

Thanks guys. Sometimes these processes can run away.

 

[mrapplegate]

Thanks guys. Sometimes these processes can run away.

You can also "guess" at what a program is by inspecting it in Activity monitor and choosing Open Files and Ports. You can sometimes get an idea from what files it is using.