Just remember, if you find something on your system, and you don’t know what it is…. Â Don’t immediately panic, try to understand the situation first.
I just read a startling account, of someone thinking that StackShot, was direct evidence of their Macintosh OS X system being rooted by some evil HACKER.
Stackshot is a built-in diagnostic tool, and is expected to be built-in to the Mac OS X system. Â From the MAN page:
The stackshot daemon is used to capture stack traces for each thread on the system; this includes both user space and kernel stacks. The resulting view of the system is internally consistent. Stack pages that are paged out are not captured–this caveat does not apply to kernel space stacks, which are wired. The stack snapshot is triggered upon pressing a special key chord; this is currently Control-Option-Command-Shift-Period.
So there is no reason to believe that this tool is a problem. Â Not at all.