Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his Sparc4 was running slow

Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by em-bee on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @06:35AM (#36860370)

the key "feature" of the exploit was the ability to send messages anonymously. the unix commands "write" and "wall" allow you to send a message to any users terminal.

apparently "wall" has a switch "-n" to hide the sender

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99460/sending-messa...

for windows there was "net send" which could be exploited by a tool called NetSendFaker, but this was 1991, so i doubt that already existed.

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Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by yencabulator on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @12:59PM (#36880940)

There was a time on some UNIXes where you could just write to other people's ttys, no write/wall needed, just echo >/dev/...

Making write/wall sgid, and restricting tty write access to that group, was a significant security upgrade back in the day.

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