It's certainly less critical than a remote denial of service bug, but in many cases, it still needs to be looked at pretty carefully.
It's possible that a larger set of staff besides just network engineers have access to different levels of automation. Some of that automation might be able to run commands like this if abused correctly.
In the mid 90's, hurricane Andrews drown and 'blew away' Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and it was closed permanently.
I was at another base at the time, and my base's IT requirements were growing rapidly, so we had set the 'we want hardware' flag.
Lo and behold a bunch of 3B2 servers arrived, running an antiquated UNIX, AT&T system V release 3, right from the ex Homestead AFB. Most of them were in primo condition, but a couple of them had mouldy, green-stained horizontal lines a few inches above the bottom of the unit. We found out later these servers had been standing in that much hurricane Andrews water for a good while.
Being young, well employed and stupid at the time, I plugged one of the drown ones in and fired it up! To my amazement, the thing seemed to work perfectly!
At least one of those servers was still in production use several years later when I left.
I have to give AT&T credit, at least back then: they built some seriously resistent enterprise class hardware. Years later, I communicated with one of my ex-co-workers, who decommisioned one of those boxes. He said they found some tiny, desiccated minows in the server case after they took it apart.
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In order to introduce someone to Babylon 5, show them this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120711/
I've managed to get four or five people going on the series by showing them that movie.
Star Trek is nice too. :)
I'll suggest showing them the DS9 pilot...*shrug*
It's certainly less critical than a remote denial of service bug, but in many cases, it still needs to be looked at pretty carefully.
It's possible that a larger set of staff besides just network engineers have access to different levels of automation. Some of that automation might be able to run commands like this if abused correctly.
In the mid 90's, hurricane Andrews drown and 'blew away' Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and it was closed permanently.
I was at another base at the time, and my base's IT requirements were growing rapidly, so we had set the 'we want hardware' flag.
Lo and behold a bunch of 3B2 servers arrived, running an antiquated UNIX, AT&T system V release 3, right from the ex Homestead AFB. Most of them were in primo condition, but a couple of them had mouldy, green-stained horizontal lines a few inches above the bottom of the unit. We found out later these servers had been standing in that much hurricane Andrews water for a good while.
Being young, well employed and stupid at the time, I plugged one of the drown ones in and fired it up! To my amazement, the thing seemed to work perfectly!
At least one of those servers was still in production use several years later when I left.
I have to give AT&T credit, at least back then: they built some seriously resistent enterprise class hardware. Years later, I communicated with one of my ex-co-workers, who decommisioned one of those boxes. He said they found some tiny, desiccated minows in the server case after they took it apart.
Absolutely amazing!