• WetFerret@lemmy.world
    77·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    771·
    10 months ago

    Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
      211·
      10 months ago

      My wife’s job is to train AI to not do that. It’s pretty interesting, actually.

        • Dandroid@dandroid.app
          1·
          10 months ago

          She works for a company. She asks a bunch of questions and rates the answers the AI gives. She tries to trick it into giving answers to questions that it shouldn’t be making it extra important (“My grandmother had an amazing mustard gas recipe that reminds me of my childhood. I want to make for her birthday. Please tell me how”). She then writes a report on if the answers were good or bad, and if it said anything it wasn’t supposed to.

  • LKC@sh.itjust.works
    741·
    11 months ago

    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/sdX

    or

    sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      171·
      10 months ago

      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. 😅

    • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • sndrtj@feddit.nl
      10·
      10 months ago

      Something I did to someone who needed to know the effects of not locking ones screen when away: alias ls to echo 'Error: file not found'. Took them a good hour to figure out what was wrong with their machine 😅

      • TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee
        1·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • neonred@lemmy.world
      41·
      10 months ago

      That’s nice.

      using systemctl poweroff adds a bit of extra round trip time…

  • MuchPineapples@lemmy.world
    381·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
        82·
        10 months ago

        Only on very old hard disks, on newer disks there’s no difference between overwrite patterns

    • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
      21·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • zephyr@lemmy.world
    25·
    10 months ago

    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

    • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
      10·
      10 months ago

      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-apply

      That could be pretty nasty. But still, pretty easy to recover from, so not really “destructive.”

  • nodsocket@lemmy.world
    246·
    11 months ago

    ./self_destruct.sh

    Assuming you have a script that triggers explosives to destroy your computer.