This results in the attacked system opening a shell with root privileges. The issue, tracked as CVE-2016-4484, was discovered by Spanish security researcher Hector Marco, who also found last year that ...

The root account must be used with caution. Run the wrong command, and disaster could strike. Instead, you should always use sudo. When I first started using Linux, there was no choice but to work ...

Unprivileged attackers can get a root shell by exploiting an authentication bypass vulnerability in the polkit auth system service installed by default on many modern Linux distributions. The polkit ...

A vulnerability in cryptsetup, a utility used to set up encrypted filesystems on Linux distributions, could allow an attacker to retrieve a root rescue shell on some systems. A vulnerability in ...

Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad news—a 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running most major distributions ...

A useful thing that some distros have started doing is setting the color of your shell prompt differently if you're logged in as root. This gives you an additional visual cue that helps avoid doing ...

If you don't love the shell you're using on your Linux system, change it! There are plenty, including bash, fish, ksh, tcsh, zsh. There are quite a few shells on Linux system and more that can be ...

GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...