I am running Fedora 27 and use Gnome as my desktop. I started Files (Nautilus) and noticed that there is an unknown network under "Other Locations": "dp-729308QF".

When I try to open it, I get an error:

Opening "dp-729308qf.local(sftp)". You can stop this operation by clicking cancel.

I have no idea what this is. I've tried pinging dp-729308qf and it returns "64 bytes from unallocated.barefruit.co.uk (92.242.140.2). . ." which is apparently a server near London.

As an additional data point, my wife's Ubuntu LTS release shows it as well.

Is there a simple explanation for this?

Please let me know.

That is the state trojans.

I've been able to track this down some more. The dp-729308QF.local hostname resolves to a non-routable IP address on my home network. After some trial and error, it appears to be associated with an Amazon Alexa.

We've removed it from our network and plan to create a guest WiFi network and then put it on this guest network so it can't communicate with the rest of the machines on our network.