What are these files before me?

[kurious]

I am majorly paranoid about OSX and virus attacks. None so far, but I don't even know where to begin protecting my MAC short of not "file or web sharing". I periodically check those invisible directories OSX hides. (e.g. Volumes, etc, var, root, etc.) . Today I noticed 3 files in the root directory labeled:

DummyDB.cwk
DummySS.cwk
DummyWP.cwk

Does anyone know what these could possibly be?

Nothing was installed that I can remember other than Opera and Netscape.

Any ideas?

[at_sym]

.CWK files are ClarisWorks data files. In other words, they're probably nothing to worry about, but it's good to be careful.

FWIW, http://www.securemac.com/ has tons of links to security tips.

[Craig R. Arko]

Man, that was fast! :D

AppleWorks still uses the same file extensions, so that's where they probably came from.

[kurious]

Thanks at_sym. Sweet link. I don't feel so much like mulder now. :D

[Phil St. Romain]

I used Xlocate to search my entire drive and found them on all three partitions where I run Appleworks, usually in the Support or Help files folders. Convinced that they were not trojan horses, I opened them and they are DataBase, Spreadsheet, and Word Processing files, all with the word "empty" on them. My guess is that they are used as images files for the Help files.