PhotosPete wrote:
I have an M1 Mac mini running Monterey.
A few times a month I see a file flash across the screen but it gets verified before I can see what it is. It may be different files being verified but like I said I can't read them. Today a file paused a few seconds so I can read it. It had no real file name, just a few characters, mostly things like &*# etc.
Being that Apple was verifying it and it was allowed to download to my computer, can I assume that this file is safe? It's just odd that there's no real filename.
After it downloaded, I ran Malwarebytes and the scan came up clean.
That is not very specific, vague at best— "mostly things like &*# etc.....(?)"
Downloaded? How do you know it was a download?
Under what circumstances is this happening, from what application?
Can you take screen shot of the dialogue
Shift Command 3 is a fast way to capture...
Try turning off Automatic updates and test over time... you should still get update notifications without issue.
ref: How to manually update apps on your Apple device - Apple Support
Do you have any third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus ?
—all known to cause issues on the macOS
You can see a download log from Finder.
Finder>Go>Go to Folder copy & paste:
/var/log/install.log
you can see from Terminal.app all macOS software updates (including date &time) — from the command line copy & paste:
softwareupdate --history | grep '^macOS'