[ubuntu-za] Ubuntu Linux virus?

[David Robert Lewis]

There are a number of ways one could write a linux virus

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/6229*
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The reason I am inclined to think there is some malware, is that I found 
a couple of email being sent out to my address book in which I clearly 
had not bothered to mail the address concerned. So there is some virus 
activity in my thunderbird. Also, I keep getting this

psmouse.c: bad data from KBC - timeout


Which is related to the mouse problem. So I might have installed 
something which tries to take control of the PC.

I tried loading and unloading psmouse, but still a problem. Not sure 
what to do.

David.



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Morgan Collett wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 21:45, David Robert Lewis<ethnopunk at telkomsa.net> wrote:
>   
>> Not sure what to make of this weird behaviour.
>>
>> Mouse is acting very strangely, spazzes out, jumps around starts to
>> click on things. I even get logged out of my session.
>>
>> Started doing this a couple of days ago, and then just froze up.
>>
>> I fixed the freeze by unloading psmouse (sudo modprobe -r psmouse)
>>
>> and then reloading it.
>>
>> Then I figured it might be the versioning, and I reloaded by stripping
>> out the version info
>>
>> sudo modprobe -f psmouse
>>
>> This worked, unfroze but now mouse is back to its old tricks.
>>
>> It feels like a hack attack, or some kind of virus?
>>
>> Alternatively could be something to do with java and xulrunner, because
>> it happens only when I have a browser open?
>>     
>
> I like to see what's happening under the hood of my systems, so I
> always add the System Monitor applet to the top GNOME panel. I set it
> to show me CPU, memory, network and system load.
>
> The CPU display especially helps to show when something kicks in with
> a high impact to the system - like a flash video in the browser, or
> some times Firefox just runs away with the CPU and I have to kill it
> to get my system back.
>
> If you're running on a system with limited memory, that's a likely
> cause of system slowdown when the RAM gets full and it starts swapping
> memory of active programs to the swap partition only to need it again
> and swap something else out - "thrashing". Eventually the whole system
> may freeze for 5 minutes until the OOM killer (out of memory) detects
> there is a problem and kills something to free up the memory.
>
> The System Monitor helps with that too and you can show how much of
> your swap is in use.
>
> It's *unlikely* to be a virus, because in the words of RMS,
> "GNU/Linux" "wasn't designed to execute programs that arrive in the
> mail" (or words to that effect). Hence the jokes about "virus
> execution failed - please run as root".
>
> Regards
> Morgan
>
>   

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