Excessive resource usage notifications
Posted: 13 Mar 2013, 23:06
I have a VPS server with the latest versions of cPanel and CSF. The VPS hosts a few websites for myself and some friends, not random strangers, so there's a higher level of trust with anyone who has access, so I don't really have to worry about any users doing stupid or dangerous things on the server, but I suppose there's always a chance one of them has a security hole in a script they're using. Anyways, starting a few days ago, I started getting a lot of excessive resource usage notifications, mostly surrounding process time. Here's a few:
As I understand it, this is the SFTP process and there's not much to worry about. I've disabled FTP and require users to use SFTP. So the presence of this process makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why I suddenly started getting these. I've been known to leave SFTP and SSH connections to one of my user accounts on the server open on my local PC for hours or days on end when doing development work. Never got any e-mails. Not sure why these suddenly started, as I have not modified any CSF settings recently.
If I understand this one, it's the process that processes Webalizer/AWstats logs. What I'm unsure about is why this is apparently running for 4 hours. Also, if I view processes as soon as I get this e-mail, there is no sign of this process running. I'd think that maybe csf was killing it (despite it saying it didn't), but the logs appear to be updating normally. Again, these e-mails are a recent development and no recent changes to csf or cPanel web log config.
More Webalizer. Not sure why this is flagged as suspicious, and not sure why I recently started getting these.
I know I could just add these processes to ignore and never see these e-mails again, but I'd like to find out why these are happening and prevent it, because all of these false positives are cluttering up my inbox and may hide any real problems.
Thanks.
Code: Select all
lfd on xxxxx: Excessive resource usage: xxxxx (13434 (Parent PID:13431))
Time: Wed Mar 13 17:24:27 2013 -0500
Account: xxxxx
Resource: Process Time
Exceeded: 1802 > 1800 (seconds)
Executable: /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server
Command Line: /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server
PID: 13434 (Parent PID:13431)
Killed: No
Code: Select all
lfd on xxxxx: Excessive resource usage: xxxxx (13915 (Parent PID:13811))
Time: Wed Mar 13 17:02:24 2013 -0500
Account: xxxxx
Resource: Process Time
Exceeded: 14173 > 1800 (seconds)
Executable: /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/perl/514/bin/perl
Command Line: cpanellogd - http logs for xxxxx
PID: 13915 (Parent PID:13811)
Killed: No
Code: Select all
lfd on xxxxx: Suspicious process running under user xxxxx
Time: Wed Mar 13 09:06:37 2013 -0500
PID: 5736 (Parent PID:5721)
Account: xxxxx
Uptime: 62 seconds
Executable:
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/webalizer_lang/english
Command Line (often faked in exploits):
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/webalizer_lang/english -c /home/xxxxx/tmp/webalizer/webalizer.conf -N 10 -D /home/xxxxx/tmp/webalizer/dns_cache.db -R 250 -p -n xxxxx. com -o /home/xxxxx/tmp/webalizer /usr/local/apache/domlogs/xxxxx. com.bkup
Network connections by the process (if any):
udp: X.X.X.X:60828 -> 4.2.2.4:53
Files open by the process (if any):
/usr/local/apache/domlogs/xxxxx. com.bkup
/var/cpanel/locale/en.cdb
/home/xxxxx/tmp/webalizer/dns_cache.db
I know I could just add these processes to ignore and never see these e-mails again, but I'd like to find out why these are happening and prevent it, because all of these false positives are cluttering up my inbox and may hide any real problems.
Thanks.