linux box hacked ?

Hi,
I want to know how one can know for sure if a linux box has been hacked. This morning a linux box in our lab was behaving funny. More clearly, i was executing some commands and on doing a 'grep', 'grep' threw a segmentation fault!! Also, I saw (with a 'ps -A') there were several processes running with names like'xscan', 'pscan'. There were several 'cat' commands running; some of them were dead (if that's what defunct means). Also, I noticed that the executables for 'cat', 'grep' and a few others showed a modification date of today. I tried to reboot the system, but that never happenned. The boot loader complained about /etc/fstab being corrupted or missing, and ofcourse as booting procedure uses the 'grep' command (which was throwing segmentation faults), the machine couldn't boot.

We really couldn't figure out for sure what happenned but do any of these symptoms indicate that somebody could have hacked into it?

Thanks,
Anshuman

PS: We had Apache web server running on this machine and we didn't have a firewall installed (other than linux's basic firewall install).


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Re: linux box hacked ?

hello,

Anshuman Singh Rawat wrote:
> Hi, I want to know how one can know for sure if a linux box has been
> hacked. This morning a linux box in our lab was behaving funny. More
> clearly, i was executing some commands and on doing a 'grep', 'grep'
> threw a segmentation fault!! Also, I saw (with a 'ps -A') there were
> several processes running with names like'xscan', 'pscan'. There were
> several 'cat' commands running; some of them were dead (if that's
> what defunct means). Also, I noticed that the executables for 'cat',
> 'grep' and a few others showed a modification date of today. I tried
> to reboot the system, but that never happenned. The boot loader
> complained about /etc/fstab being corrupted or missing, and ofcourse
> as booting procedure uses the 'grep' command (which was throwing
> segmentation faults), the machine couldn't boot.
>
> We really couldn't figure out for sure what happenned but do any of
> these symptoms indicate that somebody could have hacked into it?

check or change your ram...
else reinstall your system...

simon
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