about comsat

From: Lucio Chiappetti <lucio_at_ifctr.mi.cnr.it>
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 18:40:09 +0100 (MET)

When running "top" recently I found a process "comsat" running on my Alpha.

I was quite surprised since I knew what comsat is, and do NOT use biff.
I use pine, but I've never noticed it invoked comsat.

I suspected some crook had insinuated a fake "comsat" (we had an hacker attack
on another machine with a fake "telnetd") but ps showed it was child of
inetd, and the executables in /usr/sbin look OK.

After I checked with "biff" that the setting was actually "biff n" (I thought
a misspelling "diff" with "biff" could have done it) the "comsat" process
disappeared.

Is all this normal, or should I suspect intrusions ?

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Lucio Chiappetti - IFCTR/CNR - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.ifctr.mi.cnr.it/~lucio/personal.html
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Received on Thu Nov 27 1997 - 21:29:49 NZDT

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