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Mac HighSierra - flagged Pirrit in directory 'tetragynian'?

My (company-provided) Sophos flagged the Pirrit virus, and I did a 'remove'. What was odd, though, was the location: not in a mail attachment, where most viruses come in, but in a system Library directory: /Library/tetragynian/Contents/MacOS/tetragynian

Being curious, I tried to find out what/who 'tetragynian' was, and discovered that Google and apple forums have NO hits on that term (in relation to computers... it's the adjectival form of a genus of flowers). 

That's weird... most Mac items, apps, etc., show up readily when googled, so I'm a bit worried. Can anyone fill me in?



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  • I have being doing some research into this for you (by that i mean a lot of googling) and don't take this as 100% certainty because I haven't looked at Pirrit much previously (sorry i'm a Windows guy). However it looks like Pirrit uses combinations of random words both for file names and folder locations. So if i had to guess I would say tetragynian was probably just the next random word on it's list to use. The reason you can't find anything on it is most likely because it has never used that word before, or if it has nobody else has thought to ask about it.

    I wouldn't be worried about it, I would delete it though, however just to tidy up not because of any threat.

    Also technically Pirrit isn't a virus, it is classed as a Potentially Unwanted Application (PUA) or Adware by most vendors. this is why you have the option to authorize it in the screenshot you included. however why anybody would want to authorize Pirrit i don't know.

    Hope that helps.