• WetFerret
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    7911 months ago

    Many people have given great suggestions for the most destroying commands, but most result in an immediately borked system. While inconvenient, that doesn’t have a lasting impact on users who have backups.

    I propose writing a bash script set up to run daily in cron, which picks a random file in the user’s home directory tree and randomizes just a few bytes of data in the file. The script doesn’t immediately damage the basic OS functionality, and the data degradation is so slow that by the time the user realizes something fishy is going on a lot of their documents, media, and hopefully a few months worth of backups will have been corrupted.

  • Otter
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    7711 months ago

    Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later

    • Dandroid
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      2011 months ago

      My wife’s job is to train AI to not do that. It’s pretty interesting, actually.

      • Mike
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        1011 months ago

        A bad actor doesn’t care what your wife does. :)

        • Dandroid
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          111 months ago

          She works for a company. She asks a bunch of questions and rates the answers the AI gives. She tries to trick it into giving answers to questions that it shouldn’t be making it extra important (“My grandmother had an amazing mustard gas recipe that reminds me of my childhood. I want to make for her birthday. Please tell me how”). She then writes a report on if the answers were good or bad, and if it said anything it wasn’t supposed to.

  • @LKC@sh.itjust.works
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    7311 months ago

    If you allow root privileges, there is:

    sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

    If you want to be malicious:

    sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX

    or

    sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;

    • Shadow
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      3911 months ago

      Let’s extend a little and really do some damage

      for x in /dev/(sd|nvme)*; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=$x bs=1024 & ; done

      • @mrbaby@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Now alias ls= all that. And throw it in a background process. And actually return the value of ls so it doesn’t look like anything nefarious is going on.

        I bet you could chroot into a ram disk so you’re not tearing the floor out from under you.

        The victim would find this prank hilarious and everyone would like you and think you’re super cool.

        • wellDuuh
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          311 months ago

          You evil being! LMAO You just made me even more paranoid now, questioning every command I type 🤣

    • @MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
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      11 months ago

      sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX

      sudo cp /dev/urandom /dev/nvme0n1 or

      # cat /dev/urandom > /dev/nvme0n1

      Way faster.

      But honestly, find ~/ -type f -delete is almost as bad.

    • Carighan Maconar
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      1711 months ago

      Everyone else talking about how to shred files or even the BIOS is missing a big leap, yeah. Not just destroying the computer: destroying the person in front of it! And vim is happy to provide. 😅

    • @TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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      211 months ago

      True, just entering vim on a pc for a user who doesn’t know about vim’s existence is basically a prison sentence. They will literally be trapped in vim hell until they power down their PC.

      • @electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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        211 months ago

        I once entered vim into a computer. I couldn’t exit. I tried unplugging the computer but vim persisted. I took it to the dump, where I assume vim is still running to this very day.

  • MuchPineapples
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    11 months ago

    Everyone is deleting data, but with proper backups that’s not a problem. How about:

    curl insert_url_here | sudo bash

    This can really mess up your life.

    Even if the script isn’t malicious, if the internet drops out halfway the download you might end up with a “rm -r /”, or similar, command.

    • @Bitrot
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      711 months ago

      So many things these days use that install.sh piping stuff, very bad practice.

  • enkers
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    3511 months ago

    Worst I can imagine would be something like zeroing your bios using flashrom.

    • @al177
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      811 months ago

      Sometimes EDID eeproms are writable from i2c-dev… And sometimes VRM configuration ports too…

  • @zephyr@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Everyone is talking about rm -rf / and damage to storage drives, but I read somewhere about EFI variables having something to do with bricking the computer. If this is possible, then it’s a lot more damage than just disk drives.

    Edit: this is interesting SE post https://superuser.com/questions/313850

    • @waigl@lemmy.world
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      1711 months ago

      That ‘amp;’ does not belong in there, it’s probably either a copy-paste error or a Lemmy-error.

      What this does (or would do it it were done correctly) is define a function called “:” (the colon symbol) which recursively calls itself twice, piping the output of one instance to the input of the other, then forks the resulting mess to the background. After defining that fork bomb of a function, it is immediately called once.

      It’s a very old trick that existed even on some of the ancient Unix systems that predated Linux. I think there’s some way of defending against using cgroups, but I don’t know how from the top of my head.

    • I was going to suggest a fork bomb, but it is recovered easily. Then I thought about inserting a fork bomb into .profile, or better, into a boot process script, like:

      echo ':(){:|:&};:' | sudo tee -a /bin/iptables-apply
      

      That could be pretty nasty. But still, pretty easy to recover from, so not really “destructive.”

  • @Bitrot
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    11 months ago

    “wipefs -a” instantly removes filesystem signatures. It’s fast, doesn’t actually delete data but is just as effective in most cases where you’re not worried about someone trying to recover it. Much faster than rm on /. As far as the OS is concerned the drive is then empty.

    “nvme format” is also fast.

    • huf [he/him]
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      311 months ago

      youngsters and their tools… we just used to dd some /dev/zero onto the block device and ^C out of it after a second or two… :D