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March 12, 2008
Back to Basics With Unix Permissions
Last week, Charlie Schluting had a piece on managed Web app installations for hosting providers. He was writing in reaction to the unfortunate way unsecure Web applications in the hands of inexperienced users cause a lot of security headaches that contribute directly to the assorted botnets drifting around in the ether.
One of the things he touched on was the lamentable way lazy developers will put apps out there with instructions to open up the permissions on a directory or installer file, then either forget to tell the user to revert the permissions to something sane or don't just script that part themselves. So you get a lot of people blindly following instructions, tapping in seemingly innocuous commands that leave gaping holes in a server's security.
So this week he came back with a back-to-the-basics article on Unix permissions. Maybe not new to most Unix/Linux mavens, but worth printing out or forwarding to people coming at things from a background other than Unix administration who don't spend a lot of time on the command line unless they're unpacking a tarball with the latest easy-to-install Web app .
Posted by mhall at 6:38 PM | Add Comment
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