Virus or Something Else?
I help troubleshoot and maintain a couple of iMacs for friend's company. They called me the other day because their 2017 iMac Pro running OS 12.6.? suddenly slowed to a crawl and they were getting the constant beachball that would spin for thirty seconds or so then it would let you work for maybe 15-20 seconds then it would lock up again.
I did all the typical checking, looked at activity monitor, checked available hard drive space, etc. Nothing seemed out of place. They did get a Adobe Creative Cloud error message, when we used the "Fix" button on that error is got to about 40% then locked up and had to have a hard restart. I researched Adobe's website and reloaded the creative cloud from there. It would run and Photoshop would run after that, but the beachball persisted.
When I checked their TM backup TM couldn't access the disk. I checked the drive and it showed zero items and the entire 4TB available. I know for a fact that time machine had been working for a few months.
This sounds to me like, virus, malware, ransomware, or whatever the latest evil is out there. I'm just wondering if there is something I am missing. Can anyone think of another explanation for these symptoms?
I am checking today to see if there is a software update available but if everything is up to date or that fix doesn't work I'm going to be left with a lot of work doing a clean install and getting them back to where they were. Suggestions?
iMac Pro
