Why such an anouncement! I mean who would do such a thing?

[kdetech]

See this anouncement in cafe

The Community Cafe

ATTENTION ALL USERS: Malicious Commands
http://ubuntuforums.org/announcement.php?f=11

What's the point I'm sure no one would do such a thing like sudo apt-get remove apt-get:biggrin:

Edit bodhi.zazen : Please feel free to discuss the issue, but please be advised that we ask you not post malignant code, even as "proof of concept" or "don't do this " or warnings attached.

~ Thanks

[Barrucadu]

You'd be surprised :p

[lukjad]

Yes, many people would. In fact, if someone had told me in very certain terms to do exactly what they said, at one point I probably would have been tricked. Most people do things by rote, and so if you tell them to do something, they most likely will.

[Ratscallion]

+1

[chriskin]

i have always considered that people can not be that stupid to erase their own drives because someone just told them to. i got surprised when i found out that it happens - and it is not always at noobs :O

[chriskin]

The rm command would be suspicious, but I would probably execute a script if someone told me to.

as for your signature, i wanted a firefox add-on to run opera's unite feature, but there isn't one

as for the rm command, yes it can do some damage but it isn't difficult to see if it is bad or not, just check what it deletes :P

[lukjad]

Ah, but one space and there goes copy->paste

[unknownPoster]

I would argue that majority of the users here on UF are inexperienced with Linux, as such they don't know any better than to run bad commands.

[Cyked]

I'm sure no one would do such a thing

I'm sure they same type of person who would delete system32 for faster internets...

[Sandlst]

As I recall, the issue was that certain user(s) were posting those commands in the 'absolute beginner talk' subforum to try and trick beginners. If I had seen that when I first started using ubuntu, I probably would have pasted it in without thinking, as I didn't know anything about linux or linux commands at the time. :)

[DoktorSeven]

vv Signature vv

[aysiu]

Well, before it actually happened, there was no need for such an announcement.

I think I'd been a part of the forums for at least two years before the first malicious command was posted. Then all of a sudden people started changing their signatures to tell folks not to use one particular malicious command.

Then we just created the sticky to warn people.

It isn't a widespread phenomenon, but we don't want it happening again, even one more time.