Does Homeland Security use spyware? Is this an example?

Factual Questions
1

My husband found a doc titled: FΩ, in his Mac system folder (OS 9.2.1) He couldn’t do anything with it. Size is 4k. It had no discription. It didn’t say what is was or
Sherlock said it is spyware used primarily by the FBI, Homeland Security, and similar agencies. :eek:
He is a firefighter for a large manufacturing company, that handles lots of goverment contracts. He has clearances. The company is “belt tightening” so they are finding less than above board reasons to fire people. Could they be tracking him when he’s off duty?
He said he went to the Homeland Security website last night. Could that be where it came from? I thought Mac’s were immune to spyware. Should he just throw it away?
It shook us up a lot. If its just a HLS deal, from accessing their site,Ok, but the other possibilities :eek:

Thanks,
Mary

2

Macs are not immune to spyware; it’s just that no one’s writing spyware (other than tracking cookies) that targets Macs.

3

Download and install Snitch and use it to get the file type and creator code on the thing. Or send me a copy via email attachment and I’ll peel it for you and try to figure out what it does.

I doubt seriously that it’s spyware. There is no known MacOS spyware, 9 or X, and if there were to be any written it’s highly unlikely that they’d bother to target MacOS 9 at this point.

When you say you “can’t do anything with it”, you don’t mean it won’t let you drag it out of the System Folder, do you? (That would be massively weird under OS 9). If you’re at all worried about what it does, go ahead and do that and then reboot.

4

Damn, screwed up the link.

http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/NewSearch?key=snitch