very strange Finder behaviour.

[cb911]

i was just surfing the net before, i had LimeWire, Camino & a few other things open.

i just went to Find something (cmd+F) and i saw that where it said "search in" the option was home. i have used Find before, and the option has most of the time been set to "everywhere". a few seconds after i clicked 'search' the beachball came up and then something crashed & Console came up, i didn't take any notice of it & just quit Console. now i wish i looked at the log to see what crashed. after i quit Console, the Finder was back at it's default settings, all of the prefrences i had changed were reset.

i had set Console to save logs of crashes, are these saved in Home>Library>Logs>Crash Reporter? the Finder.chash.log says it last crashed November last year. how is it possible to reset all of the prefrences without having a crash? or is there another location where crash.logs are stored?

i'm sort of paranoid about this because i was having a look at undergroundmac.com and seeing all that stuff about hacking and viruses freaked me out.

could i have been hacked or something? it's sort of bugging me not knowing why all of my finder prefrences were reset.

also, does LimeWire have spyware or anything?

thanks for any help you can give me to ease my paranoia.

 

[melchior]

i've heard this happened before. i don't think you got hacked. i think the chances of getting hacked on OS X are very low. there aren't script kiddies to worry about and it's just obscure, basically.

all those prefs are in your /Users/my_name/Library/
does it look alright? bookmarks and stuff ok? was it only finder or everything else too?

you might check out
/var/log/
/Library/Logs/

you can always do a search from terminal
% sudo find / -name "*crash*"
or somesuch...

and geez, i was looking at that site and it's ancient. really old. don't let it scare you.

 

[cb911]

all of my bookmarks and stuff are OK, as far as i can tell. it was only the Finder that seems to have reset itself.

i quit LimeWire after that as well, then things started to speed things up a bit. my uptime is about 3 1/2 days, but there was a slowness while i was using LimeWire. could that just be because it uses lots of resources?

everything seems too OK for me to have been hacked. i'll try not to be too paranoid about being hacked.

just out of curiosity, how long would it take someone to hack OS X, and do something like delete documents etc? i'm guessing that it would take a decent amount of effort, am i right?

 

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by cb911
just out of curiosity, how long would it take someone to hack OS X, and do something like delete documents etc? i'm guessing that it would take a decent amount of effort, am i right?

to make you feel better, once one figures out a way to hack the OS, it's probably a matter of a very short time before they could do anything. that said, i highly doubt there's anyone who would waste the time trying to find holes in security to do **** like that. i think apple probably pays about 99% of the guys who even think about doing that.

 

[cb911]

hhmmm.... well that does make me feel better.

now i'll be able to leave my TiBook on tonight and sleep easy.