Despite appearing rather complex at first glance, the Linux terminal is a nifty tool for most tasks, be it installing new packages or troubleshooting the most obscure errors. That said, enabling root ...

When attackers take advantage of an exploit, one of their first goals is to gain superuser (root or administrator) access to the compromised system. If the compromised process is already running with ...

A vulnerability nicknamed "Stack Clash" allows an attacker to gain root privileges on a UNIX system and take over vulnerable machines. The flaw was discovered last month by security researchers from ...

Logging in as the root user should never be done on Linux. Using the root account could lead to disaster. Sudo is the preferred method of gaining elevated privileges. When I first started using Linux ...

The 'sudo' keyword in Unix and Linux allows users to execute certain commands with special-access privileges that cannot otherwise run on a given machine by a user with a lower level of clearance.

A vulnerability in the Linux sudo command has been discovered that could allow unprivileged users to execute commands as root. Thankfully, this vulnerability only works in non-standard configurations ...

In the Linux Journal article “Implementing Encrypted Home Directories” (August 2003), I described how to encrypt home directories transparently. This article describes how to implement another ...