Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later
My wife’s job is to train AI to not do that. It’s pretty interesting, actually.
A bad actor doesn’t care what your wife does. :)
I too choose this guys wife
How does she accomplish it?
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 {} \;
JFC. That’s terminal.
Yes, you enter that in the terminal
🙃
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
I think we can do that faster!
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1m | tee /dev/(sd|nvme)*
Nice idea!
Worst I can imagine would be something like zeroing your bios using flashrom.
Sometimes EDID eeproms are writable from i2c-dev… And sometimes VRM configuration ports too…
1.- I will start with the infamous rm-rf /
I don’t think there’s anything shorter or more elegant than this really. When you’re right you’re right.
These days the GNU rm specifically warns you and asks you to confirm before proceeding
dd
been there and done rm -rf as root
Why?
because I wanted to delete something? It was probably 23 odd years ago
I think in these days, rm will warn you if you do a
rm -rf /
Ah. Just curious if you were actively trying to nuke a distribution or were following instructions from a troll online or something.
It was one of those moments where you just mistype something when trying to clear out a whole dir
vim
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.
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.
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. 😅
I can’t remember but having my hard drive encrypted, I believe there is a single file that messing with it would render the drive not decryptable.
Here is the command that will render a LUKS encrypted device un recoverable
From the documentation.5.4 How do I securely erase a LUKS container?
For LUKS, if you are in a desperate hurry, overwrite the LUKS header and key-slot area. For LUKS1 and LUKS2, just be generous and overwrite the first 100MB. A single overwrite with zeros should be enough. If you anticipate being in a desperate hurry, prepare the command beforehand. Example with /dev/sde1 as the LUKS partition and default parameters:
head -c 100000000 /dev/zero > /dev/sde1; sync
sudo apt install gnome
That wouldn’t work on my system.
Typing apt just opens the man page for pacman.
sudo apt remove ratpoison
:(){:|:&};:
Came here for this one. Not the most destructive, but certainly the most elegant.
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.”
sudo panman -Syu
with a caveat: just read the news feedsmbios-token-ctl pick one of the “dangerous - permanent write once” tokens
Mistaking if= and of= when using dd.
After all, it is known as the Dick Destroyer.
Edit: Disk Destroyer, I meant to write “Disk Destroyer”…
😂
Ouch!
Why didn’t they called them from= and to= ? :(
sudo chmod 000 -R /
is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known 🙂What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?
How are you gonna run chmod when you don’t have permissions to use it anymore?
Yep. You could run chmod again to fix it (from a different OS / rescue USB), but that would leave all the permissions in a messy state - having everything set to 777 is incredibly insecure, and will also likely break many apps/scripts that expect more restrictive permissions. So the only way to fix this properly would be to reinstall your OS/restore from backups.
The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system.
chmod
is also a file. Andls
. Andsudo
. You see where it’s going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for “fixing” things) will reveal that system is dead.
Can you recover from that?
sudo apt install microsoft-edge-stable
Look, a heretic!
Someone put it in AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/microsoft-edge-stable-bin
It’s also in NixOS for some sick reason: https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=23.11&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=Microsoft
I actually use it on NixOS
Gotta use teams for work and it functions least poorly in edge
Is there a command that will publish your browsing history?