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Sloppy File Permissions Make Red Star OS Vulnerable
An anonymous reader writes: Red Star OS Desktop 3.0, the official Linux distro of North Korea, which recently found its way onto torrents and various download sites in form of an ISO image, is interesting for a number of reasons, including its attempt to look like commercial operating systems (currently OS X, earlier versions mimicked the Windows GUI). Hackers are also poking Red Star for security vulnerabilities. An pseudonymous researcher noted in a post to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list, that the OS has one significant security hole: Red Star 3.0 ships with a world-writeable udev rule file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules (originally designed for HP LaserJet 1000 series printers) which can be modified to include RUN+= arguments executing arbitrary commands as root by Udev. In the post he also mentions how the older Red Star 2.0 shipped with another schoolboy mistake: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit was world-writeable.
Unix doesn't help much. I mean if apache can't read /home/me/www/path/to/index.html the OS isn't going to tell you its because of the permissions on /home. Meanwhile you have given up and gone chmod -R 777 /
Actually, both the browser and the Apache log will tell you it's a permissions issue. Go to the root of /home and either add the Apache user to the group that has access to "/home/me/www/path/to/index.html" or change the group access to Apache's user.
Once the group is correct, change the permissions to g+r if necessary.
Taking the 15 seconds to properly set permissions when you know the issue is a permissions issue (otherwise why would chmod 777 fix the issue) really is just too easy not to do.
Also, use your signal lights!
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