Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data - eviltoast
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  • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
    1·
    8 months ago

    I think the theme mentioned probably don’t have sudo access, just user access can do enough harm already.

    I think rm command should refuse to remove overly-broad target (home, xdg dirs, media drives) without confirmation in the command line.

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Ok, then a bad actor could enumerate all the subdirs and delete them one by one.

      Even if going down this path would be a good solution, I don’t think this is rm’s job to do. This should be done by an antivirus a security suite. I think I have read that for the past few years the kernel now has a better API than inotify to get notified by file operations. I don’t remember it’s name, but I think it was even mentioned in the docs that security software is a use case of it

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        1·
        8 months ago

        This is not a defense against bad actor, but defense against bugs in bash script, which is quit common. Another idea is to introduce a new trash command xdg-trash to replacerm. But both of these cannot stop malicious actors removing your file.

        I think even if we have a security suite, it is unlikely to detect bad actor recursively enumerating the file and delete them one by one, until many file is irrversably lost.

        Antivirus has never been a proper way to achieve security, I think the proper way to defend against offensive rm is probably sandboxing.