Question

Almost Every Day strange proceses taking up 90% of my cpu

Almost every day I receive an alert email telling me that CPU is higher than 70% and always it’s a weird and different process that I can not find any info, please help.

Proceses names:

  • phpadYGh4_xguep. user: www-data
  • phprlAgER_xguep user: www-data
  • phpwjRDtF_xguep. user: www-data 99.7%
  • phpGZHefh_xguep user: www-data 99.8%
  • php0Lo20s_xguep user: www-data 100 %
  • php0cqpRh_xquep user: www-data 99.8%
  • phpcelNMD_3gtmn user: www-data 92.8 %
  • phpIl0BQF_3gtmn user: www-data 97.4%
  • phpRbmj1P_xguep. user: www-data 92.1 %
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Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• February 8, 2018
Accepted Answer

Unfortunately this most likely indicates that your droplet has been compromised and malware is running on it either to attack other servers or with the CPU use here, possibly mining cryptocurrency.

You should immediately back up any needed files and create a new clean server to migrate to. Cleaning an infected server can be an extremely time consuming and often futile process. Once you have a new server set up there are a few steps you can take to help secure it:

  • Use an SSH key for authentication rather than a password

  • Configure automatic security updates

  • Change the default SSH port

  • Enable the local firewall.

These guides will help you with these steps:

Unattended updates Initial Server Setup (includes ssh keys, firewall, changing ssh port)