Article View: comp.security.misc
Article #969Re: Unix Viruses. Are there any??
From: Paul C Leyland
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 11:28
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 11:28
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2131 bytes
In article <senetza.727648754@honte> senetza@sigma.uleth.ca (Len Senetza) writes:
Description of perverted ls(1) deleted.
so, if root executes your ls, then x is attached to some program in the
system. have your x only do it to programs which are suid. then it's
all over the place; memory protection and file access controls fail
here.
this assumes that root has . in its path, and how many root accounts
out there do?
Mine don't. Long time ago, in a previous life, the site I was
sysadmin for got bitten by this very trojan (except someone
implemented it as a shell-script rather than a binary). It was done
for a "joke". At the time, I was 1200 miles away on vacation. When I
got back, the joker had several interesting interviews with me, his
supervisor and the head of the faculty.
Several consequences:
1) Root never has . in its path
2) The joker stopped playing dangerous games, and went on to be
a good system hacker.
3) Demonstrated that my insistence on good backups wasn't purely
obsessional, but was actually vital to a research group.
4) The victim superuser, learned to type \/bin/su - root
to avoid some of the more obvious su trojans.
Paul
--
Paul Leyland <pcl@oxford.ac.uk> | Hanging on in quiet desperation is
Oxford University Computing Service | the English way.
13 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN, UK | The time is come, the song is over.
Tel: +44-865-273200 Fax: +44-865-273275 | Thought I'd something more to say.
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!pipex!warwick!uknet!comlab.ox.ac.uk!pcl From: pcl@ox.ac.uk (Paul C Leyland) Newsgroups: comp.security.misc Subject: Re: Unix Viruses. Are there any?? Message-ID: <PCL.93Jan25112838@rhodium.ox.ac.uk> Date: 25 Jan 93 11:28:38 GMT References: <1993Jan15.090426.12195@unix.brighton.ac.uk> <17988@umd5.umd.edu> <senetza.727648754@honte> Organization: Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Rd Oxford OX2 6NN Lines: 37 In-reply-to: senetza@sigma.uleth.ca's message of 21 Jan 93 20:39:14 GMT