On Sat, 17 Oct 2009, András Murányi wrote:
2009/10/17 Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca
Just [textfile] and [soundfiler] are enough to overwrite important files. A user's most important data is typically writable, and write-protected files are usually the files that are easy to reinstall from a DVD or whatever. And then writability is only one half of the problem when you can have your personal data uploaded to your enemies.
Or a worm/rootkit set up on your box.
if a user has a single non-root account in which s/he does as many things as possible, then there's not many important things that you can only do as root. therefore rootkits have limited usefulness. it's still a VERY good idea to avoid rootkits, but gaining root isn't making the difference between stealing an addressbook or not, it isn't making the difference between rm -rf ~ or not, and it doesn't make the difference between running a spambot or not.
Indeed. What's worse, i download scripts from unknown dudes and run them root on a daily basis (most of them are makefiles ;o)
Well, I'm sure you trust your OS provider a lot more than random fictitious people sending you YourDocument.ZIP.EXE that are associated with application /usr/bin/wine...
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