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.
Calm down there Satan.
So basically malware by a sadistic internet troll?
It’ll just write a new Shakespeare play
I think we may need to implement a 128 bit unix timestamp before that will work.
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/sdXor
sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;JFC. That’s terminal.
Yes, you enter that in the terminal
🙃
cat bomb_threat.txt | mail [email protected]
sudo chmod 000 -R /is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known 🙂What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?
The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system.
chmodis also a file. Andls. Andsudo. 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.How are you gonna run chmod when you don’t have permissions to use it anymore?
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Glorious.
What’s this do?
My guess is that it takes the output of the “exit” command and writes it to .bashrc. I believe this would make it impossible to open the terminal, but it could just close the terminal and do nothing instead.
That’s nice.
using
systemctl poweroffadds a bit of extra round trip time…
vim
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. 😅
Emotional damage
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.
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.
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.
Worst I can imagine would be something like zeroing your bios using flashrom.
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
Probably dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or whatever your system volume is
With wear levelling on SSDs you may be able to recover some of the data
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I did have RH Linux die while updating core libs a very long time ago. It deleted them and the system shut down. No reboot possible. I eventually (like later that day) copied a set of libs from another rh system and was able to boot and recover.
Never used rh by choice again after that.
./self_destruct.sh
Assuming you have a script that triggers explosives to destroy your computer.
Reminds me of those Defcon talks where they discover it’s really hard to pack a HDD killing device into a 2ru server.
whoamiIt really was a feat that they were able to implement the Total Perspective Vortex in busybox.
Ctrl-D
Kills the terminal instantly.
Is there a command that will publish your browsing history?
This is probably a start: https://askubuntu.com/questions/631631/getting-internet-browsing-history-from-shell#631637
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.
The LUKS headers. If those are corrupted you can’t decrypt the drive. The good news is that you can back up the headers to prevent that from happening.
Those aren’t files, though, they are just some sectors on your block device. Sure, if you mess with those, your ability to decrypt your disk goes out the window, but then, when was bypassing the filesystem and messing with bits on your disk directly ever safe?
It’s possible he was using an encrypted key file instead of just a password for that extra strong security. In that case, of course, if you lose that file, kiss your data good bye.
Here is the command that will render a LUKS encrypted device un recoverable
From the documentation.5.4 How do I securely erase a LUKS container?
For LUKS, if you are in a desperate hurry, overwrite the LUKS header and key-slot area. For LUKS1 and LUKS2, just be generous and overwrite the first 100MB. A single overwrite with zeros should be enough. If you anticipate being in a desperate hurry, prepare the command beforehand. Example with /dev/sde1 as the LUKS partition and default parameters:
head -c 100000000 /dev/zero > /dev/sde1; sync
