Mea culpa. A stupid little bug crept into linux-ftpd for Debian, and some other Linux distros. Some may have fixed it, but Debian hasn't. The effect is that ftpd now runs /bin/ls (for DIR and similar commands) with GID=0. Does not seem terribly dangerous as I do not seem able to trick ls into running anything, nor are there any interesting objects thusly accessible. Would become a "root hole" if someone finds a way to execute anything from /bin/ls (as started from ftpd). Please see http://bugs.debian.org/384454 for details. Cheers, Paul Szabo psz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/ School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Australia
