How do I disable Perl on my centOS web server?

[jaguarr]

Hello

I have a centOS web server set up for about a year now. For the past several weeks, my server has been getting huge amount of incoming traffic, almost every day from around 12am to 6am. During this time, if I do a top in shell, i see a lot of perl processes. I am posting a sample section below.

Can someone please tell me how to disable perl, or find out what those processes are? I don't have FTP server running, just a normal apache server. Do I have a security issue?

Thanks

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 7035 www-data  20   0 37312 8140 3152 S    2  0.8   0:00.06 apache2
 7037 www-data  20   0 37276 7972 3144 S    2  0.8   0:00.05 apache2
 1170 mysql     20   0  147m  38m 3032 S    1  3.9 279:47.65 mysqld
 8778 root      20   0 11304 5156 1492 S    1  0.5   1:50.62 perl
 1281 root      20   0 12776 8148 1760 S    0  0.8   0:01.78 perl
 1313 root      20   0 12760 8236 1764 S    0  0.8   0:02.70 perl
 4741 root      20   0 13268 8628 1764 S    0  0.9   0:02.08 perl
 4746 root      20   0 13288 8648 1764 S    0  0.9   0:01.96 perl
 4808 root      20   0 12892 8248 1760 S    0  0.8   0:02.09 perl
 6794 root      20   0 12544 8036 1764 S    0  0.8   0:02.83 perl
    1 root      20   0  2528 1052  848 S    0  0.1   0:01.56 init

[Rubberman]

A lot of utilities that run at regular times (usually late at night to minimize impact on normal operations) use perl scripts to do their thing. That is what is probably going on. Look at your services and cron lists.