this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
207 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37746 readers
47 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
honestly, this feels more like a proof of concept than an actual hack. passwords are almost universally encrypted and stored in /etc/shadow nowadays and when I was on the security CoP at my old job cat'ing /etc/passwd was how we proved basic read access to a system but nothing more.
It is possible that something like this could exfil the file as well, which might leak info about what daemons a given system is running. An attacker could possibly then do some research to find vulnerabilities for a given service version and try the real attack later. Generally complex kill chains like this aren't viable for mass scanning though, much more likely that they would just automate an attempt at a few common exploits than force themselves to do actual recon.