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My laptop seems to be acting rather weird - saying that another person is logged in when I try to shut it down (or maybe it likes being turned on).

So how do I know whether my Debian laptop is being hacked or not?

Are there some kind of general guidelines for checking?

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unplug the network cable. if you still get the same message, then it's a problem with the comp, not a hacker –  Nate Koppenhaver Aug 8 '11 at 17:18
you probably had logged in as a root in the terminal and closed the terminal window without logging out –  Baha Aug 8 '11 at 17:20
So what does it really do? Can you be a bit more specific (e.g. what does it say exactly)? –  slhck Aug 8 '11 at 19:45
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3 Answers

You can run w and who commands on the command line to see what is being run and who is connected to your machine. Additionally, you can use netstat -a to see active internet connections.

If you find users you don't recognized connecting to/from unknown addresses/sites then you may want to investigate further.

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Inspect your auth.log:

sudo less /var/log/auth.log
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well, it seems that I was a bit paranoid :)

I also found chkrootkit and its howto at: http://www.howtoforge.com/scan_linux_for_rootkits

anyway, thanks for all these answers!

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