this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Holy shit this is kind of unsettling. Though I would expect ALL major browsers to reject reading any local files like this..... would this kind of thing actually succeed somewhere/somehow?
If you ran your browser as root and configured your browser to load local resources on non-local domains maybe. I think you can do that in chrome://flags but you have to explicitly list the domains allowed to do it.
I'm hoping this is just a bad joke.
you don't need to be root to read
/etc/passwd
That’s because passwd doesn’t store the password hashes. Just user names.
Are you sure? What do you get when you run
$ cat /etc/passwd
in terminal? Just paste the results here 😇Edit: to anyone reading this on the future, don't actually do this, it was a joke
yup pretty sure
😉
Weird, all I see is *******
Since you told me not to. There isn't a risk on most linux systems; passwords were moved to /etc/shadow a long time ago. It only leaks the names of your users and largely useless info for most attackers:
Well it's not completely useless. It offers some insights into the system. Which service accounts exists, what usernames are used.
If an attacker finds a valid username they can then start bruteforcing the password.
From your account list we can see you have sshd and xrdp. Do they both provide the same kind of bruteforce protection? Are there any recent exploits for either?
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Yeah, seems highly unlikely to ever yield any results. Even if you did manage to read a file, you have to get lucky finding a password hash in a rainbow table or the password being shit enough to crack.
Also generally the actual password (or rather its hash) is stored in /etc/shadow on most systems from the past 20 odd years.