the key "feature" of the exploit was the ability to send messages anonymously. t... | Hacker News

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		em-bee on July 25, 2023 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Got called to a professor’s office after a complai... 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.

yencabulator on July 26, 2023 [–]

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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