Hello everybody! I can say I’m a newbie at Linux. Wanted to ask about Linux’ task viewers. On the famous task viewers such as bpytop, htop etc., can viruses hide from them? Excluding the injected codes, can virus & tracker/logger softwares hide from classic task viewers of Linux? Do they show all kinds of services and running tasks?
Depends on the malware.
With total access, nothing would prevent the malicious code from modifying the task viewer itself to make it ignore the resources it is using.
Accounting for every way malware might be discovered is difficult, but with enough system access, it’s all possible.
It also depends on the viewer. I remember using
prctl()in C to chamge a process name and top showed my change but htop didn’t. I’m sure a competent malware writer would be able to trick it thoughiirc, postgresql renames itself in htop to show its current status and which database it’s operating on
In general, no. Most malware that runs its own process simply uses some name intended to make you not notice it. But it is possible, in Linux just as in every other operating system that ever existed, to imagine that some unusually sophisticated malware manages to exploit some unknown vulnerability to gain full control of the kernel and then all bets are off, then it would be able to do anything.
Getting the sudo password is pretty trivial.
Just alias the sudo command to catch it and pipe it to the wanted tool.
With the sudo password you can recompile the kernel and add a random kernel module to it.
Only secureboot and verified boot make problems there. These are actually useful!
