Unknown disk activity on 2 day old server

February 13, 2014 1.2k views
craig.stowers
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craig.stowers
I'm relatively new to web servers and linux. After looking at the monitoring graphs, my VPS has had very little disk activity (nor should it as there is nothing worth visiting on the webpage). However last night while I was sleeping I notice a very regular spike in disk activity - (every 15 minutes). Is this something to be worried about? Could hackers be up to no good? Or does it simply mean DenyHosts is doing it's job properly and writing to the banned IP list?
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3 Answers
kamaln7 MOD February 13, 2014
It could be anything. It's could be logrotate cleaning up and compressing old logs, iptables writing logs, denyhosts writing logs, and a ton of other stuff. If it's a small spike, there's probably nothing to worry about.
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craig.stowers February 13, 2014
Oh I checked the auth.log and found all kinds of strange activity. Someone creating user accounts and settings etc. I just wish I knew how it was hacked. I disabled root ssh, changed ssh port, installed denyHost. guess I got a lot to learn ahead of me
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kamaln7 MOD February 14, 2014
Someone creating user accounts and settings etc
Can you pastebin the lines from auth.log that show that? It could be bots trying to brute force into your droplet, denyhosts should help mitigate that.
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