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Comment by michh | Hacker News Reader

In this case, if I read the article correctly, only a single account was compromised. I'm assuming the www user doesn't have sudo privileges (though I might be wrong as it shouldn't have a password either and it clearly did..).

Sure there might have also been a local privilege escalation vulnerability, so rootkits are definitely something to check for. Depending on the situation, re-installing might be less work, so then it'd make sense.

But especially if you're not the only one using the machine, having to reinstall the OS every time a single user fucks up and has 'password' for a password, it's going to get really tedious really quickly.

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> But especially if you're not the only one using the machine, having to reinstall the OS every time a single user fucks up and has 'password' for a password, it's going to get really tedious really quickly.

This is what automated installs are for. Kill the box, fire up a new one, and run the provisioning scripts. As a bonus you've got actual documentation showing how the box should be set up.

If an attacker can get elevated privileges through an user account, the users themselves can do so as well.

And you shouldn't trust them either, so you need to assume they have if they could have. That means definitely reinstall when you find out you've been vulnerable to e.g. a local root exploit, regardless of user accounts have been hacked.

I made sure. www has no privileges. It can't read root's home directory or touch any of its processes. If it could, I'm sure I would be busy cleaning up a much larger mess instead of blogging about it.

I'm not trying to imply you didn't check thoroughly because I don't know the whole story and your background. But for me personally I wouldn't take the risk - even if the compromised account was 'nobody'.

I certainly don't know enough about computer forensics to make sure that a system hasn't been altered (and I dissect malware for recreational purposes). So unless it's a system that hosts something completely unimportant I'd take the weekend free to wipe + reinstall the stuff.

Even recently a linux local privilege escalation has been discovered[0]. So who knows what the hacked www user really had access to.

[0] http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q2/467

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