PROC-3612 - Zombie processes

This information is provided as part of the Lynis community project. It is related to Lynis control PROC-3612 and should be considered as-is and without guarantees. Any advice and commands should be tested before implementing them in production environments.

Control details
CategoryProcesses
Application

Description

This control tests for zombie processes

How to solve

Zombie processes are in an "undead" status. This means they ended, but were not properly terminated by the kernel. Sometimes it is a matter of waiting, before they disappear. If you got many zombie processes, there might be a specific cause. This is usually related to a software package and how it behaves. An update might solve the issue, especially if more people encountered it as well.

Need more details?

Consider the upgrade to Lynis Enterprise to receive additional details and guidance. The Enterprise version helps to you with daily health checks of your environment, learn in-depth system hardening, and resources to protect your systems better.

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About

Lynis is a technical security auditing tool for Unix flavors like Linux, macOS, AIX, Solaris, and *BSD. It is open source software and free to use. Typical usage include system hardening, compliance testing, and vulnerability scanning. The project has an active community, including development via GitHub.

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Benefits: automate security audits, detailed reporting, compliance testing.

  • Centralized management
  • Improvement plan with priorities
  • Reporting
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  • Predefined policies
  • Integration (API)
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