• WetFerret@lemmy.world
    32·
    6 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@lemmy.caEnglish
    261·
    6 months ago

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

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      8·
      6 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.worksEnglish
      1·
      6 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
        2·
        6 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.

    • sndrtj@feddit.nl
      4·
      6 months ago

      Something I did to someone who needed to know the effects of not locking ones screen when away: alias ls to echo 'Error: file not found'. Took them a good hour to figure out what was wrong with their machine 😅

      • FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
        1·
        6 months ago

        linux rookie here, what’s the command to reverse an alias then? do you just “alias ls ls” to overwrite it?

  • LKC@sh.itjust.works
    18·
    6 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 {} \;

    • oriond@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      6 months ago

      What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?

      • Ruscal@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        6 months ago

        The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system. chmod is also a file. And ls. And sudo. 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.

      • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
        2·
        6 months ago

        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.

    • al177@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      6 months ago

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

    • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      6 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.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
      4·
      6 months ago

      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.”

  • MuchPineapples@lemmy.world
    9·
    6 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.

  • NaN@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    7·
    6 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]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      6 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