Linux – Processes spawning randomly and sucking CPU

linuxprocessUbuntu

I am currently on Ubuntu 16.04, and I have noticed slowdowns across the server in general. Upon viewing htop, I noticed that processes with random commands are spawning, while taking the CPU usage with it; Here is the image that shows an offending process. When trying to view which user started the process, the pts shows as a '?' as shown below:

# ps -feww | grep netstat
root      7444     1 91 01:29 ?        00:01:37 netstat -antop
root     13051     1  0 01:31 ?        00:00:00 netstat -antop
root     13063     1  0 01:31 ?        00:00:00 netstat -antop

I successfully killed the process with signal 9, but after a few seconds, another process with a completely different command pops up, and ran until I killed it. Rebooting the server did not fix this.

Would appreciate some advice on this, thanks!

Best Answer

Turns out the server was compromised from XorDos, causing it to run random process while doing a spoofed UDP flood.