On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Edsel Adap wrote:

> Very easy, just produce a lot of drive activity (can be accomplished by
> extracting a fairly large tar file) and then turning the power off on the
> system. The next time the system boots, fsck runs. While fsck is running,
> turn of the power again, repeat a few times and eventually you'll get errors
> which will require manual intervention.

On that note...if you have that kind of access to the machine in question
and can't break root, it's probably time to find a new line of work, or
crime if that's the case. I don't see a whole lot of potential for a
remote attack here. Basically, you have to find a way to create a lot of
disk activity, then somehow halt or reboot the machine without killing the
process that is thrashing the disk. That could prove to be quite a
challenge without already having root. In fact, that could be difficult
with root access.

Of course, with the ongoing blackouts in California, and a bit of good
luck (or bad depending on your perspective) you might catch someone with
no UPS (or be caught with no UPS). But that's pretty silly so I'll stop
there.

--
Jonathan Rickman
X Corps Security
http://www.xcorps.net

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]