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Does anyone know what this "thing" is?

It seems ALL of my computers have some sort of Mac virus which has been tons of fun to try to deal with so far. Does anyone know exactly which one might be causing a "corruption" to my boot drives as well?? I'm afraid if I waste all this time again doing Internet Recovery the corrupt boot drives will just reinfect everything.


Btw you can easily check for this issue as well by starting up in recovery mode and seeing what your hard drive/boot drive looks like from a Finder view in the Disk Utility option provided. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


This picture is from my other post (What's up with this? Catacomb folder?) yesterday. Notice all the "?" where folders should be. Brand new 15" 2016 MacBook Pro i7 4gb radeon 460 with 16gb of memory, and 2 other MacBook Pros a Mini and a iMac all with the same issues and numerous other ones. Advice on how to wipe the entire system?


User uploaded file

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Sierra (10.12.3)

Posted on Jan 28, 2017 5:51 PM

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5 replies

Jan 28, 2017 6:06 PM in response to ChaseDaniel

And, what drive/disk is the picture of? You do not appear to be in the regular Macintosh HD since it is not highlighted (in left column); however, in the next column, it is.


Next question: what folder are you in - referring to this:


User uploaded file


Next: how/when did you install Catacomb (googling it reveals that it is third party software)? Do a search and uninstall it.


And, last question: out of curiosity - what are these files (three, all ending with pcapng) on your hard drive?


If you want to erase the entire hard drive - that is easy: boot into recovery (or your bootable external backup), wipe the drive and then reinstall the OS. Make sure to back up your files first so you can move them back later. Choose very carefully when moving things back so as not to re-introduce files you really do not want.

Jan 28, 2017 9:51 PM in response to babowa

I found that to be strange too and there are a lot of randomly labled folders in that same randomly-generated seeming text I see there. I'm in the main hard drive but looking at it from the Disk Utility Finder window in Recovery Mode. I don't know where that label came from since I clicked the folders listed there..it's like some strange fake folder or something.


I looked that up to and really have never heard of it and there's no way it got installed on my computer by anyone with physical access to the computer. No clue what it is and there's no trace of that game anywhere accessible on my computer. Also the Catacomb folder isn't anywhere to be found in standard viewing mode either.


The .pcapng files are all ones that I saved using the packet trace program Wireshark to investiage network activity. It's a standard file format for many common packet analysis programs. I wasn't aware I saved them so sloppily. This computer had already been wiped and had its operating system reinstalled and after seeing those files and questions marks, and other oddiites I kept looking into things figuring I'd be erasing the drive (and the boot system now too) again shortly...

Does anyone know what this "thing" is?

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