DNSMASQ - Why is this running?

Question

So, I was poking around htop, and looked at what processes were running. For some reason, a process called dnsmasq is running. The full command is

/usr/sbin/dnsmasq --no-resolv --keep-in-foreground --no-hosts --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.pid --listen-address=127.0.0.1 --cache-size=0 --conf-file=/dev/null --proxy-dnssec --enable-dbus=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.dnsmasq --conf-dir=/etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d

The question is: Am I getting hacked? Is this normal? I did sudo apt-get remove --purge dnsmasq but it said it wasn't installed. The user that ran this was nobody

Answer 1

Because that's what Network Manager uses to cache DNS locally. It's from dnsmasq-base. This version of the package doesn't include the server-start-up scripts that the dnsmasq package does.

If you are being hacked, this has nothing to do with it. It's completely standard for Ubuntu.