Is this an attack on my machine? How can you know for sure?

[Terry D. Cudney]

Hi,

	I'm suspicious of the security of my system. I'm running DSL (which uses PPP over Ethernet).

	Yesterday I had an incident where my machine seemed to bog down  while I wasn't doing anything unusual that would cause it..

	The only thing I can find is in the /var/log/messages file where I find lines llike this:

Feb 15 17:37:00 eden -- MARK --
Feb 15 17:57:00 eden -- MARK --

	I don't know enough about the log files to know if this is a valid log message... It looks suspicious to me.

	Can anyone tell me if this is a normal message? Pointers to recommended reading on the log file (normal) contentes and Linux Security on the 'net would be most appreciated.

	Advance thanks for any help that you net/security gurus can lend.

		--terry

Name:	Terry D. Cudney
Phone:	(905)735-6127
E-mail:	terry at wasagacottage.com
WWW:	www.wasagacottage.com



Q:	What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A:	A canary with the super-user password.