MRT and ReportCrash

[mnewman]

I ran top for some unrelated reason and noticed that ReportCrash would run about once every ten seconds and report a crash of the MRT process. Further digging with console showed that this had been happening since about 4:00 PM on April 14th.

As I understand it, MRT (Malware Removal Tool?) is something that was introduced in a security update to OS 10.6. (I'm on 10.7.3.) I think it's just supposed to run, notify you if it found something, and then quit.

I looked back in the logs for the time when ReportCrash started to report crashes with MRT and can find nothing obvious that would have started it running or crashing every ten seconds.

I found out how to remove it here:

OS X 10.6 showing high CPU usage after Security Update

I wonder why it took so long to show up on my machine?