Initially I titled this «My laptop was hacked» but because the way they got in was by guessing a password, so it’s difficult to consider this a hack. Furthermore, what they did was pretty standard stuff, so although they technically broke into my laptop, I feel more like I invited them, they had a couple of beers and left. Either way, it was a back-to-basics experience for me and I want to share it with you.
When a process goes crazy to a point that I can no longer open a terminal for further analysis, I am really glad that I have permanent real-time resource monitors on my screen. This has been a valuable tool multiple times at least to understand what is happening just by peeking and take quicker and better action than if I hadn’t. This screenshot is from Xfce 4.14:
Top bar on my laptop screen. Lots of monitoring in there.
Today was one of those days. Not that the computer was slow, but worse: the CPU monitor was showing this:
The top bar shows two virtual cores being fully used, but nothing else.
Two out of four CPU virtual cores were being used to their maximum capacity but the other monitors were fine. I had not left anything running through the night so it was possible that my computer was hacked. But… how?! Follow the story step-by-step so you can follow my train of thought and learn from my mistakes.
I immediately ran top to find out more and I found process 311250, called kswapd0, using 200% CPU.
Cuidado con las vulnerabilidades. En Pleonasmos Booleanos, publicación del excelente blog Developeando, del cual me considero un ávido seguidor, Mario nos sensibiliza sobre la legibilidad de código. Nos dice que al escribir código debemos tomar en cuenta que no solo escribimos para la maquina. Concuerdo con él. Sin embargo, hay que considerar qué pasa cuando lo que … Leer más
Motivos para deshabilitar JavaScript. Está disponible en HD. Si le dan click al botón de YouTube, cambien la calidad por 720p para que se alcance a ver un poquito mejor la pantalla. Presentado el 26 de noviembre de 2013 durante la reunión mensual del grupo Tijuana.js. El audio está un poco fuerte, pero sirvió para … Leer más