the curious case of the Persian date

One of our valued organisational users reported a very odd case this week, and we’re still not sure what to make of it.

Measures for Justice, whose mission is to assess and compare the performance of the US criminal justice system, manage a fleet of over 60 macs via jamf, and run DetectX Swift’s command line tool to do regular, automated malware checks.

One particular machine, though, has begun reporting the last scan time using a Persian dateformat!

That actually translates correctly to November 13th, 2018, so we’re sure the date is correct, but given that the Mac in question is set to US locale, calendar and timezone, the Persian dateformat is completely unexpected, and unexplained.

The problem appears to be the way the Jamf EA (extension attribute) handles the time reported back from the device. While none of the other devices in the fleet report back in Persian, for some as-yet-unknown reason this one does!

We’re keeping an eye on this problem and will report back if and when more comes to light. In the meantime, if you’re a Jamf user and have seen this kind of thing happening yourself or have any insights, please drop us a comment below or contact us via Sqwarq Support.

🙂

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