Server sending tons of traffic
Yesturday morning when I was accessing sites on my server, it took forever for pages to load. When I pinged my machine, the responces were an average of 1500 ms. Also, when I tried to ping other computers on the same network, there was a similar result. I called my ISP, and they suggested that one of the computers was sending to much traffic. It was my Linux webserver, for when I shut it down, everything went down to 40 ms.
On the server, I noticed that qmail-remote was high in the process list in CPU usage, but 85.5% of the machine was idle. In the logs there are errors saying that it was out of memory, around the same time.
What could cause this? What should I do? I do not have a ton of linux experience but my primary concern is security (mainly that my machine isn't used for spam). Is there a way to tell if my machine has been hacked? Thank you ver much for your help.
