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Unknown disk activity on 2 day old server

Posted on February 13, 2014

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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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.

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

<blockquote>Someone creating user accounts and settings etc</blockquote>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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