It may take up to 24-hours before these background updates occur and your Mac needs to be awake and logged in at the time. I can assure you that SilentKnight is correct in what it is telling you, in that my Gatekeeper and MRT have been updated to the latest versions for Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave. If you don’t receive those updates by this time tomorrow I recommend you use the features of SilentKnight to force the installation of those updates.
Thanks for your suggestion, Al. My iMac was indeed at least 30 hours awake (using the “Disable Screen Saver” screen hot corner overnight) after I saw your message last week, but the situation didn’t change. I think I will wait for Apple to recognize the thing (or rather, will see if/when Apple does it) - I have never used the FaceTime camera anyway, for any kind of communication with the outside world.
If by “Apple” you are referring to macOS, then since it hasn’t noticed by now (and indeed for a very long time according to your earlier observations) it will never happen. If you don’t use SilentKnight to update those two processes, it won’t happen until the next Security Update for High Sierra is released. Again, I must surmise you have a systemic issue of some sort with properly receiving background updates.
Neither MRT nor Gatekeeper have anything to do with your FaceTime camera. That was patched by the Security Update.
MRT removes any accidentally installed malware.
Gatekeeper makes certain that you don’t download anything from the Internet that violates your AppStore settings with respect to signing, causes XProtect to check for a malware installer and to prevent the launch of any app or process who’s DeveloperID has been revoked.
How could we find out / troubleshoot the “systemic issue of some sort with properly receiving background updates”? To me, that’s the central point in this case.
Sorry, but I’ve already covered all the troubleshooting knowledge I have and I’ve been looking into these things ever since I became aware of these updates over eight years ago when XProtect was introduced into OS X 10.6.7. I’ve submitted numerous problem reports to Apple Security when an update failed for me, some of which were eventually fixed. I still have a nagging issue with incomplete App Store updates to Sierra and have found a workaround for that. Unfortunately, that one won’t work for you.
You might be able to detect what is going wrong by using a combination of a Terminal command followed by analysis of your install.log, but that’s probably a long shot, depending on your expertise in that area and the ability of that log to provide useful diagnostic information.
Your situation is unusual, but not totally unheard of. My only suggestions in these cases has been to erase the drive, reinstall the OS with no migration then re-install all apps from source, Finder copy needed user documents and reset all preferences. As far as I know, nobody was willing to take such drastic steps, so I can’t guarantee that even those steps would do the trick.
Still wondering.
Skype, Google Hangouts, or FaceTime, to name a few.