Toolkit

Story: Rogue code can take down Linux systems

Posted by: David Wright (Thursday 17 June 2004, 5:59 AM)

This has always been the case with every platform, where is the news?

With the ZX81 and CBM machines, it only took 1-2 lines of code. MS-DOS didn't need much more. Windows 1-3 needed just a bad library call to bring the machine to its knees. Windows 9x was pretty much the same and you could probably kill XP with a couple of well place library calls using invalid parameters (in fact, running many commercial games on XP will bring up the BSOD or an automatic reboot).

On a training course, we even managed to take down a VAX running VMS using a few lines of DCL, theoretically the same concept could be used to bring a Unix/Linux machine to its knees.

Locally attached users have always been able to do bad/stupid things and stop a machine running.

And I've seen a couple fo mini's and PC's killed by people who didn't even need to log in, a cleaner or engineer pulling the wrong plug out the wall is just as deadly.