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Some Linux Distros Found Vulnerable By Default

Posted by Zonk on from the change-the-settings dept.

TuringTest writes "Security Focus carries an article about a security compromise found on several major distros due to bad default settings in the Linux kernel. 'It's a sad day when an ancient fork bomb attack can still take down most of the latest Linux distributions', says the writer. The attack was performed by spawning lots of processes from a normal user shell. Is interesting to note that Debian was not among the distros that fell to the attack. The writer also praises the OpenBSD policy of Secure by Default."

2 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. Grep Bomb by cheezemonkhai · · Score: 5, Interesting


    So what would a good limit to the number of processes spawned be?

    I mean what can say what is good for everyone?

    Saying that if you think the fork bomb is good grep bombs are more fun and particularly good for silincing the mass of Quake 3 players in an undergraduate lab:

    'grep foo /dev/zero &' fun about 5 of them and watch the box grind to a screaming halt then eventually recover.

    Oh hang on did i just discover a new exploit :P

  2. Debian not vulnerable? by lintux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I really wonder what kind of Debian installation he runs. Just a couple of weeks ago I had to reboot my Debian box after some experimenting with an obfuscated fork bomb. Won't work again now that I set some ulimits, but they're not there by default.

    In case anyone is interested, here's the obfuscated fork bomb: :(){ :&:;};: