this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
1955 points (97.2% liked)
linuxmemes
21263 readers
927 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudo in Windows.
- No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I sometimes leave my laptop on, but the monitor turned off when I go to sleep. Sometimes when I wake up, the fans on the laptop will be running full speed, which dies down soon after I turn the monitor on and use the laptop for a little while. Do you think this might be a symptom of some covertware running on my laptop?
Perhaps.
There may be easier ways to test for this, but what comes to mind is if you install your current OS again on another partition and then leave it as you usually do, and see if the fans do the same thing. If they do, it might just be a fault with the fan control or sleep state or something.
If it doesn't happen, I'd assume something fishy is going on. Maybe try and set up a script to log your CPU usage and what's using the most every few minutes. That might catch something?
I've just now had another thought. If it's trying to be covert, maybe just leave your task manager / htop open and don't touch anything for a while, it might think you're afk and start running again. If it doesn't, it could be checking to see if common monitoring tools are running and stopping itself to avoid detection, if that's the case you'll have to be a bit smarter about trying to catch it.
tl;dr Maybe. Run a virus scan if you can, or try and find it yourself if you think you can. If all else fails, nuke the OS and start again.
That makes sense. In the end I guess it depends on what level any malware expects the user to search for it on. Thanks.