Question Lighttpd Server is running in the background on Linux ?

[PaulosK]

I tried starting xampp today, but the apache2 server wasn't starting. I used sudo netstat -nap | grep :80 to see what other programms use that port and i saw that lighttpd server was using it. I haven't manually installed lighttpd and it is the first time that this has happened. It also started on startup. Is there a chance that it was installed remotely and maliciouslyby a third party , or it was just installed by another program that needed it ?

 

[emcci]

If you are using apt,

apt-cache rdepends lighttpd

whill show you what packages need lighttpd as dependency. One of them (the first one being installed) it's the one who installed lighttpd it it wasn't already pre-installed on your distro nor some user installed it manually.

Once you see what depends on it, you can see what can be broken if you uninstall it or if you change it's default port for something different that 80.

You could also simply check what's on your 80/443 ports and see what's listening there. Also make sure to check if lighttpd it's listenning on some extra non-standard port.