strange textedit app documents appearing

21.5 IMac desktop, 2.5 GHz 1333 MHz, mid 2011, 8 GB Ram, Yosemite 10.10.5

A group of zero byte, textedit.app Document files with unintelligible names recently appeared on my HD, and I have no clue how or why they are there. There have been no suspect downloads or actions, other than some file sharing between home computers that I manage personally, and everything seems to be in order otherwise on this system. I ran EtreCheck and no adware or other problems seem to be an issue. I've included a screen shot of the mysterious files and the only red item noted on the EtreCheck scan. I'm assuming the files are harmless, but I would appreciate any ideas about their source and if they indicate any damage or security issues. Thanks.Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 4.00.57 PM copy.jpg

EtreCheck version: 2.9.12 (265)

Report generated 2016-05-12 15:55:24

Download EtreCheck from https://etrecheck.com

Runtime 2:16

Performance: Excellent

Time Machine: ⓘ

Mobile backups: OFF

Auto backup: YES

Volumes being backed up:

HD: Disk size: 499.76 GB Disk used: 192.15 GB

Destinations:

iMac backups [Local]

Total size: 999.86 GB

Total number of backups: 17

Oldest backup: 1/3/16, 7:51 PM

Last backup: 5/12/16, 3:28 PM

Size of backup disk: Adequate

Backup size 999.86 GB > (Disk used 192.15 GB X 3)

Top Processes by CPU: ⓘ

61% mdworker(10)

15% WindowServer

6% com.apple.WebKit.WebContent(2)

4% kernel_task

4% Safari

Virtual Memory Information: ⓘ

615 MB Free RAM

7.40 GB Used RAM (1.93 GB Cached)

0 B Swap Used

2016-05-14 Add comments
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    bearmore wrote:

    Thank you for the details and suggestions. I deleted those files yesterday so can't run any of the checks that you suggested, unfortunately, but I will if they show back up. The security item that was flagged on the EtreCheck report above concerned me, however, I rebooted and ran another check and see nothing flagged. I am hoping that means the security fail was a benign one-time issue, but will check again in a day or two to be sure. The date those strange files were added was close to when I was transferring some of my music files between my two computers, and had a few problems with file formats. I don't know if that could be the cause of the garbled filenames, but I'm hoping that's all it is.

    Hello again bearmore,

    I think the file transfer was likely the cause of the mystery files. Rebooting normally clears up any red failures. A few random failures every now and then is nothing to worry about. EtreCheck even has a list of well-known failures that it doesn't even mention.

    2016-05-14 0 0
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