[Gllug] p2p programs

[Martin A. Brooks]

Henry Gilbert wrote:
> Ah OK, so you know of an individual that had his Desktop Linux compromised?
> I need to interview him.

Interview away.  A redhat box I inherited as a workstation was 
compromised via a vulnerable version of wu-ftpd.

> rm -fr *
> 
> browsing the net as root or non-root will hardly make a difference
> apart from increasing one's paranoia.

Rubbish.  Let's take one example, IRC.  I frequently use IRC to get and 
provide help on various topics.  When I'm helping someone, if I were 
feeling malicious, I could ask them to execute a command that would be 
destructive if done as the root user.  Because I'm "helping" the user, 
the chances are they will just blindly copy and paste the command in.

"rm -rf" is a bit unimaginative and will almost always be recoverable. 
"dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda & (:(){ :|:;};:) " is a little bit 
harder to undo.

It's no coincidence that many "help" channels have a permanent ban on 
the root user's hostmask.

> OK were you present at the Discovery Meeting yesterday?

No, I was busy stripping and cleaning walls in bedroom #4.



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