ATTENTION ALL USERS: Malicious Commands

___________________________________________________________________________

I'd like to take a moment of your time to discuss a recent disturbing trend the staff has been noticing on the forums, and also take this as an opportunity to raise awareness of this situation through education.

We've recently had an increase in the number of dangerous commands being posted on the forums. Don't pretend you don't know what I mean -- commands that cause massive damage or disruption to the user's computer.

I'd just like to caution those thinking of doing this that UbuntuForums has a strict zero-tolerance policy when it comes to posting dangerous commands. If you post one of them, particularly in a support thread disguised as advice, expect to be instantly and permanently BANNED, at the account, e-mail, IP, or ISP level. I do not care about intent -- if you mean it as a joke, it is not funny. If you mean it as a lesson, go teach it somewhere else. This behavior is absolutely against the Forum Guidelines and Ubuntu Code of Conduct.

I'd also like to remind users to be cautious when someone tells you to run some command or download some script as a solution to your problem. When in doubt as to the safety of the procedure, it's always a good idea to wait for more opinions, and/or have the command explained to you and verify if the explanation makes sense by consulting readily available documentation on Linux commands (such as manpages). No matter how hard we try to stay on top of all posts in realtime, we are not perfect.



Regards,

The UbuntuForums Staff.



As requested by some, for the education of our users, here are some common examples of dangerous commands that should raise a bright red flag. Again, these are extremely dangerous and should not be attempted on a computer that has any physical connection to valuable data -- many of them will even cause damage from a LiveCD environment.

Again, DANGEROUS COMMANDS -- look but DO NOT RUN.

Also, this is far from an exhaustive list, but should give you some clues as to what kind of things people may try to trick you into doing. Remember this can always be disguised in an obfuscated command or as a part of a long procedure, so the bottom line is take caution for yourself when something just doesn't "feel right".

It makes me think two things:

1) lol
2) wtf?

now what's wrong with a good 'ol chmod -R 000 / every now and then?

I saw this a few months ago and had to LOL! I couldn't decide who is stupider: the asshat who says to run 'sudo rm -rf /' or the n00b who just runs in a command as sudo without knowing what it does...

The reality is that most noobs/newbies to Linux generally cut and paste commands into terminals trustingly when they are googling for solutions to a problem. This opens up the real possilbility and danger that a hacker or can craft a website with malicious commands and can falsely advertise the site as a site for solutions or fixes to a Noobs ubuntu compute problems. The unsuspecting and trusting noob takes the bait and bam gets caught up like a fly in a spider's web, lol.

For the few Mac Trojans that have been created, many of them work when the user unwittingly responds to prompts to allow root privileges and enters his or her password. There are many users who purchase Macs because they hate command line and terminals and may not realize the importance of not just entering a password when prompted. So, while this may be an issue for ubuntu users, there are equivalent Mac OSX Noobs who may be just as ignorant of such things. Hackers and trojan authors are equal opportunity attackers. To them, it does not matter if the target is a Ubuntu, Mac, or Vista Noob. For them a noob is a noob is a noob, and any noob is fair game.

The same reason why someone write virus's.
They think it is funny to have power over someone else."screw with a newbie".

In my slackware box
su
chmod -R 000 /
and
rm -r /
do not work at all and come back with a reply like "don't be stupid" or "this is a good way toward a headache"

People enjoy making fools of newbies?

Good old Patrick

In my slackware box
su
chmod -R 000 /
and
rm -r /
do not work at all and come back with a reply like "don't be stupid" or "this is a good way toward a headache"

now what's wrong with a good 'ol chmod -R 000 / every now and then?

disabling commands such as rm -r or chmod would make life harder on a hackintosh