• 0t79JeIfK01RHyzo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    24·
    6 days ago

    You can

    You can also assume you are compromised and use a solution like a Faraday cage. If you’re trying to detect advanced spyware, it might be better to check network activity from outside the device like what network activity is the router managing for the computer.

    • bambooEnglish
      12·
      6 days ago

      FWIW, if you suspect your machine has been compromised, the binaries for common tools like ps and top shouldn’t be relied upon since those probably were tampered with to hide the malicious program from the output. At that point, you’d probably want to check each running process manually under /proc/.

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      @RavenofDespair@lemmy.ml to add to this; you can use a firewall that’s aware of what your systems is trying to contact. pfsense does this in their premium products and i’ve heard ubiquiti starting doing this as well.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    5 days ago

    Honestly if you’re at the point of suspecting that your Linux system is infected, just back everything up, wipe, and reinstall. Make sure to use a known good computer to make the install disk, and completely wipe the drive before install and not use existing partitions.

    People have mentioned Wireshark which you can use to monitor for suspicious network activity, but IMO for most people this isn’t super helpful because it’s hard to tell what’s suspicious and what’s normal from Wireshark alone without quite a bit of networking/software knowledge. Maybe there’s more user friendly packet capture software though, something that can string the packets together into their respective connections and summarise key information like the protocol and domain involved.

    QDirStat can visualize the contents of your drive as an interactive map. Might be helpful for finding files that aren’t supposed to be there.

    ClamAV is an open source antivirus available for Linux but I don’t know how well it does at actually detecting Linux malware. Seems to be more for people running file/email servers to scan incoming file uploads.

  • practisevoodoo@lemmy.world
    6·
    5 days ago

    It depends on the level of mistrust you’re willing to entertain but the short version is; no, you cannot be sure.

    Ken Thompson’s 1983 talk, Reflections on trusting trust is the classic talk on just why you cannot be sure.

  • Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.world
    5·
    5 days ago

    You can never be sure there is no spyware because if your infected a sufficiently advanced spyware can hide itself.

    In theory you can use a liveCD to scan your OS for specious signs but if someone has written bespoke spyware for you it may be hard to detect as it won’t match any of the signatures.

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.today
    4·
    6 days ago

    run a barebones environment with a trusted minimal operating system (that’s freebsd/netbsd/slackware for me)

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Is this a specific PC, or a general question?

    All spyware needs to get the info to the spy somehow, so as others have said, it’s probably best to watch the network traffic.

    But also - not so much for home, more for an office - look out for keyloggers and weird physical devices attached to the PC, they can be sending data via other methods.

    And prevention is better than cure, get a good antimalware installed - and perhaps something which only allows known good (allow listing), rather than blocking known bad (block listing).

  • brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml
    1·
    5 days ago

    Some of the other comments got me curious…

    Is there a way to print the most recent accessed files (and time accessed and by which user) within a specific directory to terminal?