Silviu-Marius Ardelean's blog

I am pleased to announce my first cross-platform and open source project, the Process Status Analysis tool, available on GitHub.

The Process Status Analysis (psa) version 0.2 is available for Windows and Linux (Debian derived / Ubuntu tested) Operating Systems.
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x64 (572 downloads)
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x86 (362 downloads)
Download: psa.exe for Windows x64 (350 downloads)
Download: psa.exe for Win32 (357 downloads)

You may wonder why I did it or what it brings new. Well, I did it for fun, in my spare time and I will continue improving it when I’ll find a time to do it.

The project is written in modern C++ using idioms from the C++ 1x standards. Even if initially was done as a C++ for Windows only, during the past days I managed the port of it for Linux using Visual Studio 2017’s project templates and a connection via SSH.
In general, the source code base is similar, differing just by OS specific stuff.

In case you want to find out more about how to develop C++ Linux projects from the best development tool (imho), Visual Studio, you can find more information on Visual Studio development team blog.

Related to this psa project, the Linux version requires libprocps4-dev library in order to build.

The main reason for starting this project was that I wanted to know what’s the total memory amount used by my Chrome browser. I know it uses a lot of resources but not that much… 🙂

Even if my preferred processes analysis tool, the Process Hacker offers a lot of processes administration possibilities but it didn’t provide what I want, so I decided to enjoy a bit.

Sample – Google Chrome processes in Process Hacker tool

So, what I achieved by psa.exe was something like:

A bit too much in my humble opinion…
The features this tool offers includes:

Get all processes loaded in memory information

I case you want to have a snapshot of all the processes loaded in the OS’s memory you can have it with.

Get process only used memory

With psa.exe you can reach the used memory by a specific parameter -o after the process name or at least a part of it’s name.

Currently, there is no string replace ‘*’ but it’s ongoing.

Print processes tree

Storing the processes’ data within a generic tree done by me I took the decision to print the processes tree output, in a similar way there is in Windows with tree.exe tool or on Linux in pstree or even htop.

Process Status Analysis partial tree of Windows process

Top most “expensive” processes

In case you want to see what are the most expensive processes within your operating system you can achieve it with:

or simpler “psa -e” in case you’re sure you want top 10 expensive processes (the default value).

Redirect output to a file

From the standard output the information can be easely redirected to a file.

Kill process feature

This feature was not implemented yet but in case we need it we can be done it easily with the existing tools on the target OS (ex. Task Manager, Process Exporer/Hacker, pskill.exe for Windows or the combination ps + kill on LInux).

Feedbacks and improvements
Any constructive feedback, suggestions, contributions to improvements are appreciated.
Feel free to add any issue you find, wish or suggestion you have in the GitHub repository, the Issues section or here as a comment.

As you most probably know, this website uses WordPress. Last Saturday, trying to access the site admin area I was faced with an error generated by too many redirects.

Having other things to do, I ignored it for that moment. Later a friend of mine published on his website some information about an existing world-wide brute force attack over WordPress websites and then I started reading more information about this issue.

My Firefox’s Web Console has thrown such messages:

[13:38:30.162] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 834ms]
[13:38:30.998] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 403ms]
[13:38:31.405] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 580ms]
[13:38:31.990] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 558ms]
[13:38:32.558] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 553ms]

Most probably I was also one target for that attack.

Having a strong password and not using admin user the effective website was not affected otherwise than in wp-admin area. I contacted my website hosting provider and after some emails exchange, I was able to login into wp-admin area. First thing I did was to install and activate Limit Login Attempts plugin and the results didn’t expect too much to appear.
Today morning, this plugin sent me an interesting email.

So an attempt of brute force attack is cut.

In order to avoid any such unpleased issues it is strongly recommended following few basic steps:

• Avoid using default users (ex. admin) having high privileges.
• Use strong passwords that contain special characters also in order avoid dictionary attacks used by brute force methods. You can check if the password it’s strong enough using online free tools such passwordmeter.com or Password Checker.
• Install and activate a tool such Limit Login Attempts.
• Enjoy your life. 🙂