www-data user 100% CPU

Hello,

i'm experiencing 100% CPU usage from www-data user.
command top:

Code:

Tasks:  99 total,   3 running,  96 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 78.6%us, 21.4%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1036092k total,   831372k used,   204720k free,    51652k buffers
Swap:   746980k total,        0k used,   746980k free,   341864k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

[B]22624 www-data  20   0  4924 2524  896 R 99.7  0.2  18:29.25 perl[/B]

    1 root      20   0  2104  688  588 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.64 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.10 watchdog/0

In this forum i've read PHP 5.x Remote Code Execution Exploit ...
i would like to fix this ... but ...
how can i do ? Do i have to update PHP ?

 

Have you enabled suexec module for apache? It can block many things.

 

Thanks,
i infact did a apt-get update and upgrade
but the problem is still there

how can i update php to a safe version ?

 

Solved

Thanks ...
i'm running a debian lenny and a apt-get update & apt-get upgrade did not solve the problem.
Yes i was running a vulnerable PHP version to PHP 5.x Remote Code Execution Exploit
anyway i solved installing mod_security, following this tutorial

http://www.faqforge.com/linux/apache-mod-security-installation-on-debian-6-0-squeeze/

thanks !!!
Now i'm just wondering how to update mod_security ruleset, but i'm not in hurry anymore