On 03-Oct-04 Maura Edelweiss Monville wrote:
[...] Sorry for my ignorance ... what is a "a rootkit hunter" ?????
Regards, Maura
Myself I hadn't even heard of "rootkit" until very recently when someone posted to linux-users@lists.man.ac.uk that he had been infected twice over. In his explanation to me he wrote: "An apache vulnerability is where carefully crafted information is sent to such a web server, thus overrunning a buffer or such-like, and being able to install and execute arbitrary code. A rootkit is the stuff script-kiddies (people who use software provided from elsewhere) install on your machine, in an attempt to replace core utilities (ls, find, ps, top, ....) by ones that don't show illicit activity, even when it is taking place. In my case they don't seem to have gained root access, so have been unable to totally screw my machine, but they installed their own telnetd, nmap, stealth scanners and other software. The main problem is that chkrootkit (www.chkrootkit.org) doesn't scan for these rootkits, since they are not included. It is still worth your while to use chkrootkit!" So I went to http://www.chkrootkit.org and installed chkrootkit anyway! There may be other rootkit-checkers out there which may be preferable. There is a lot of info on this site about how rootkits work. Some of chkrootkit's tests are a bit dumb, and likely to throw up false positives (which is way better than false negatives!). In particular, any file under /usr/lib/ whose filename begins with a "." will be flagged up. Since these can be created by standard software (e.g. perl, java) they need not be, and probably are not, sinister. But don't take this for granted either! I hope this helps! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!] Date: 03-Oct-04 Time: 17:52:11 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------