Is there an ntop virus for Linux?

[Ryan Rix]

Mark Phillips wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Ryan Rix <phrkonaleash at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Mark Phillips wrote:
>>> Whenever I start my Debian Lenny testing laptop a process called ntop
>> starts
>>> and quickly consumes 99% of my cpu. If I kill the process, nothing
>> happens.
>>> If I run ntop from the command line, it does what the man page says it
>> does,
>>> and hardly consumes any resources at all. There is an ntop in
>> /etc/init.d/,
>>> and when I run /etc/init.s/ntop it consumes very few resources - the
>> script
>>> calls /usr/sbin/ntop. There are no entries in the
>> /var/log/ntop/access.log
>>> file.
>>>
>>> My questions are:
>>>
>>> Do I have a virus masquerading as ntop, and if so how do I remove it? I
>>> googled "linux ntop virus" and did not come up with anything useful.
>>>
>>> Can I just remove ntop from /etc/init.d/ ?
>>>
>>> How do I find out if another startup program needs ntop?
>>>
>>> Is ntop necessary at startup?
>>>
>> Are you monitoring your network usage?
>> if not, probably safe to remove the /etc/rc.d/ hooks for it for the
>> runlevel you are booting into.
>>
>> /etc/rc.d/rc5/XX-ntop <-- look for something like that if you are
>> booting into runlevel 5 (full desktop)
>>
>> all in all, removing init.d scripts is a bad idea.
>>
>> If the init scripts in debian use LSB, the headers will tell you which
>> (if any) require ntop.
>>
>> Does ps -aux list any options for ntop when it's run from init?
>>
>> Ryan
> 
> 
> Ryan,
> 
> I am not monitoring network usage. This weird behavior just started a week
> or so ago.
> 
> Here is what ps says when I start ntop:
> 
> narwhale:/home/mark# ps aux | grep ntop
> ntop     10943  4.5  2.6 197824 27136 ?        Ssl  09:49   0:00
> /usr/sbin/ntop -d -L -u ntop -P /var/lib/ntop --access-log-file
> /var/log/ntop/access.log -i eth0,eth1 -p /etc/ntop/protocol.list -O
> /var/log/ntop

sounds like it's just running as a standard daemon

> 
> I ran grep -nr "ntop" /etc/init.d and all references to ntop are from the
> ntop script, so I assume none of the other init.d scripts are calling ntop.
> 
> Any other thoughts, or should I just disable ntop from init.d:
> 
> update-rc.d -f  ntop remove

If you know you don't need it and know how to bring it back if it breaks 
something, feel free :)

> 
> Mark
> 
> P.S. Since I started ntop to check the output from ps, I let it run. And
> sure enough, after a few minutes, the fan started blowing hard and CPU usage
> went over 90% for ntop. Now I am really confused....I guess the real
> question is why do I need ntop to start my laptop?
>

Running a firewall perhaps with some autoblocking doohicky? I have no 
idea...

Ryan