Linux Under Pressure

Some new tools will give you better insights into your system under extreme load, and we flash back to the days of AOL and discuss the new way social hackers are spreading malware.

Plus the death of a TLD, the return of SamSam, and more!

• psi: pressure stall information for CPU, memory, and IO v2 — PSI aggregates and reports the overall wallclock time in which the tasks in a system (or cgroup) wait for contended hardware resources.
• Chinese “hackers” are sending malware via snail mail — The trick is simple: a package arrives with a Chinese postmark containing a rambling message and a small CD. The CD, in turn, contains a set of Word files that include script-based malware. These scripts run when the victims access them on their computers, presumably resulting in compromised systems.
• The death of a TLD
• SamSam: The (almost) $6 million ransomware — Through original analysis, interviews and research, and by collaborating closely with industry partners and a specialist cryptocurrency monitoring organisation, Sophos has uncovered new details about how the secretive and sophisticated SamSam ransomware is used, who’s been targeted, how it works and how it’s evolving.
• Open sourcing oomd, a new approach to handling OOMs — As our infrastructure has scaled, we’ve found that an increasing fraction of our machines and networks span multiple generations. One side effect of this multigenerational production environment is that a new software release or configuration change might result in a system running healthily on one machine but experiencing an out-of-memory (OOM) issue on another.
• Tyler's recent job story