Re: UNIX Tar Security Advisory from TEAM PWN4GE

On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:18:12 +0100, Volker Tanger said:

> Alternatively the TAR binary might be SUID'ed, which is A Bad Idea(TM),
> too - which are all SUID'ed programs that can write to arbitrary
> locations...

And in the prehistoric dawn of the computer era, about 15 years ago, IBM made
one of the first RISC-based systems, the RT. One of the operating systems
available for it was AIX 2.2 (a SYSV port, which came out before AIX 1.2 for
the x86 family of PS/2 boxes), which indeed shipped with a setuid /bin/tar.

First time I saw that, I said to myself "Damn, I've been hax0red". Then I
re-installed tar from the original system media - and promptly wished it had
in fact been a trojaned binary.

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