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sudo requires a password to be entered by default, right? I would guess that for most setups this wouldn't be possible without some kind of privilege escalation as well (or if the webserver was running with root privileges).

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You'd be surprised by the number of servers that don't ask for password when you try to use sudo. They just assume that the actual owner issued the command and go straight to issuing the command as root.

(Caveat: typically it has to be a certain user)

I'm ashamed to admit I used to think that was convenient. It makes systems infinitely more vulnerable in the event of an RCE bug.

Many systems still use passwordless sudo to permit certain users to run specific commands -- but now, if those commands are shell scripts run via bash, the users can execute arbitrary commands (this isn't an uncommon class of privilege escalation problem, though).

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