Q6 PATH Environment Variable Security

Question 1

Use a potential attack example to explain why the following setting of the environment variable PATH may expose a security hole to attackers: PATH=”.:/bin:/usr/bin”.

Answer 1

When user types ls, system will check the current directory first, before checking the trusted system directories for exectubales

It will then find and run malicious ls script without users awareness.

Attacker can even make the malicious script execute the real, safe ls command avoiding detection completely.