Score:0

Is an unknown process, downloading 1 GiB data in 30 minutes, necessarily suspicious?

cn flag

After a fresh boot and login (Ubuntu 18.04), I left the computer on like this for about 30 minutes. When I came back, I saw on the LTE router display. that some process downloaded almost 1 GiB in that time.

I confirmed it with vnstat, but I didn't menage to find out what process has used this data.

I can't think of any application that I have, that would do this.

My questions are:

  1. Can it be an innocent operating system process?
  2. Is it possible to discover retroactively what process downloaded so much data? (I have only vnstat installed).
muru avatar
us flag
Does `/var/log/apt/history.log` or the output of `snap changes` show anything that could be from that time interval?
qwr avatar
kr flag
qwr
maybe snap is up to something again
raban avatar
cn flag
history.log and snap changes of the time, are empty
ru flag
If it's a fresh installed system it could be cloud-init downloading updates. For one turned off for a while, it could be unattended-upgrades. And snaps as mentioned earlier. But it's hard to know without further details. 1. Yes, it can. 2. Check /var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/syslog
Score:2
cn flag

nethogs enabled me to see data consumption by process name. with nethogs installed, I waited for another event of "mysterious data consumption". and found out it was freshclam process, belongs to ClamAV.

see this question:Freshclam is Using Lots of Mobile Data

WinEunuuchs2Unix avatar
in flag
It's ironic you suspect a virus is on your computer when it is actually anti-virus software at work.
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