Malware threat for kde and gnome

GoogleFreak · #1 17th February 2009, 04:40 PM

"foobar posted on his blog recently, How to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps detailing potential malware infection risks in the .desktop file format used by GNOME and KDE. This is not a new threat, and it appears to be still a risk as discussions in 2006 did not seem to come to any firm conclusion on how to deal with the problem."

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/17/1526244

adrianx · #2 17th February 2009, 08:03 PM

I'm stating the obvious, but this is yet another example of why it is silly to log into your desktop as root.

I played around with it in a virtual machine (I've always wanted to do the "rm -rf...." thing

). Besides losing all of my data in $HOME when logged into my DE as a normal user, the damage was minimal. My important stuff should have been backed up, right?

When logged in as root, I lost the entire OS. Obvious, I know.... I just wanted to share my first "rm -rf...." experience.

P.S. I don't feel comfortable writing out the well-known "rm..." command.