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Re: What does this look like to you folks?


SJ Wright wrote:
Gregg Levine wrote:
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:26 PM, SJ Wright <sjwright68@charter.net> wrote:
SJ Wright wrote:
First, a little background:

In quite a few previous edits of my .bash_aliases file, I've used the same
alias to cd to a particular folder. Tonight I typed it in and got the
following as a return:
[/cygdrive/c/blu/newest]
mintty-cygwin>>smith
+ laugh
+ pwd
/cygdrive/c/blu/newest
+ cd /cygdrive/c/taiga/
+ pwd
/cygdrive/c/taiga
+ cd /cygdrive/c/taiga
[/cygdrive/c/blu/newest]
When I went to view .bash_aliases in nano, the alias 'smith' (changed at
my prerogative for discussion on this list) was missing. As far as I know,
it was there as recently as 5 AM today; I believe I used it around noon
today (27 September) as well.


Should I be worried? I've never heard of Cygwin being a target for --the
precise term escapes me at the moment so I'll say-- this kind of intrusion,
if that's what it is. As for potential "routes in," I have sshd running on
cygrunsrv but nothing else. Time to change my login password, maybe?


Steve W.

--

Of course, I edited the path for the alias back into .bash_aliases (didn't
want to give up the convenience, after all) but was prudent enough to use
another word than "smith" for it. {Think first Duke of Marlborough.}


SJW


Hello! Well I ran Google on that term, and came up with the Wikipedia page. ((Which I won't cite here.)) But don't you mean Mr Churchill the PM actually? (He also was entitled to use that entry into the peerage.)

You may not have anything to worry about, however I am not a security
expert as far as Cygwin goes, I'm more of a user on it, and even on
Linux.

I do suggest you change your passwords for both that system and for the SSH one.

If that's not possible then make it impossible for the system to be
reached that way online via SSH.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

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Anyone else care to chime in/advise/suggest something?

Presently I'm doing a context search of my Cygwin folder for the word "laugh" (the outstanding non-command word or phrase used in the harmless hack). I've already scanned, by eye, grep and two developer-type text editors, my dotfiles and the default ones in /etc/defaults/ -- though frankly this last seems a little too obvious a route for anyone who's going to drop a 'sleeper' script that fouls up a shell alias to take.

Ever notice how hackers and "script kiddies" tend to make targets of things people already are complaining about? Windows, numerous websites, and this, the latest maintenance upgrade of Cygwin. (But then, this is just an observation -- the only proof I have is in what happened to the change-directory alias known as "smith" in my .bash_aliases file, since modified.)

SJ Wright


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I just discovered what was going on. Someone had cloned the two bash aliases I most often use as scripts in a folder of the same name in my root Cygwin folder. Both of them had content similar to this:
set -x
function laugh(){

pwd
cd /cygdrive/c/taiga/

pwd
cd "$PWD"
}
laugh
(The above is "smith" in the main /scripts folder and "smith.sh" in the sub-folder in which I keep edits.)
With a change to my ssh and system password, it's likely it will be a while before this sort of thing happens again. I plan in the meantime to srm these files and attempt to better secure the /scripts folder, its local access as well.


Steve W.


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