this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
152 points (94.7% liked)

Asklemmy

43992 readers
977 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 174 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

sudo apt install microsoft-edge-stable

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I actually like Edge more than Chrome.

I don't use either, die-hard Firefox user for decades but if I'm forced to pick one...

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

Look, a heretic!

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 79 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago

Calm down there Satan.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

So basically malware by a sadistic internet troll?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] LKC 74 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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 {} \;

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Don’t forget the mmc block devices too. Gotta purge those SD cards. (/dev/mmcblk*)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] Kecessa 13 points 11 months ago

Yes, you enter that in the terminal

πŸ™ƒ

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 71 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

I too choose this guys wife

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 68 points 11 months ago

cat bomb_threat.txt | mail [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 59 points 11 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 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. πŸ˜…

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

Emotional damage

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Ruscal 57 points 11 months ago (16 children)

sudo chmod 000 -R / is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known πŸ™‚

load more comments (16 replies)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Enkers 37 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Probably dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or whatever your system volume is

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Posible to recover data, use /dev/urandom.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think poor Lemmy is trying to help URL encode your fork bomb lol

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ctrl-D

Kills the terminal instantly.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

"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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] teegus 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is there a command that will publish your browsing history?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't know about how exactly to do it, but I do have an idea or two.

  1. Something that will reflash the firmware on as many devices as possible using garbage data. At least the UEFI.

  2. Filling most of the drive space, leaving let's say 50MB, then overwriting those 50MB repeatedly to damage the hardware itself. I suppose you could do the same with RAM. If we're dealing with PMR/CMR HDD, then you should just be able to write to specific sectors without doing it by filling the rest.

  3. If present, keep ejecting the DVD drive. Either the mechanism dies or someone accidentally bumps into the open tray and breaks it off.

  4. Keep hard rebooting the laptop after some time. It may corrupt some data, and put the blame on hardware. The hard reboot can be done by echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger This will need magic SysRq compiled into the kernel, and power off/reboot enabled. The latter can be done by enabling all magic SysRq functions echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq or just reboot/power off with "128".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

1.- I will start with the infamous rm-rf /

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I don't think there's anything shorter or more elegant than this really. When you're right you're right.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

emacs

(Runs away....)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Dd is known as disk destroyer for a good reason. Very easy to fuck yourself over.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next β€Ί