sudo apt install microsoft-edge-stable
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Look, a heretic!
I actually like Edge more than Chrome.
I don't use either, die-hard Firefox user for decades but if I'm forced to pick one...
Someone put it in AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/microsoft-edge-stable-bin
Many people have given great suggestions for the most destroying commands, but most result in an immediately borked system. While inconvenient, that doesn't have a lasting impact on users who have backups.
I propose writing a bash script set up to run daily in cron, which picks a random file in the user's home directory tree and randomizes just a few bytes of data in the file. The script doesn't immediately damage the basic OS functionality, and the data degradation is so slow that by the time the user realizes something fishy is going on a lot of their documents, media, and hopefully a few months worth of backups will have been corrupted.
Calm down there Satan.
So basically malware by a sadistic internet troll?
Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later
My wife's job is to train AI to not do that. It's pretty interesting, actually.
If you allow root privileges, there is:
sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
If you want to be malicious:
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX
or
sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;
Let's extend a little and really do some damage
for x in /dev/(sd|nvme)*; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=$x bs=1024 & ; done
Now alias ls=
all that. And throw it in a background process. And actually return the value of ls so it doesn't look like anything nefarious is going on.
I bet you could chroot into a ram disk so you're not tearing the floor out from under you.
The victim would find this prank hilarious and everyone would like you and think you're super cool.
Donβt forget the mmc block devices too. Gotta purge those SD cards. (/dev/mmcblk*)
JFC. That's terminal.
Yes, you enter that in the terminal
π
vim
Everyone else talking about how to shred files or even the BIOS is missing a big leap, yeah. Not just destroying the computer: destroying the person in front of it! And vim is happy to provide. π
Emotional damage
sudo chmod 000 -R /
is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known π
Everyone is deleting data, but with proper backups that's not a problem. How about:
curl insert_url_here | sudo bash
This can really mess up your life.
Even if the script isn't malicious, if the internet drops out halfway the download you might end up with a "rm -r /", or similar, command.
Worst I can imagine would be something like zeroing your bios using flashrom.
Mistaking if= and of= when using dd.
After all, it is known as the Dick Destroyer.
Edit: Disk Destroyer, I meant to write "Disk Destroyer"...
Probably dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or whatever your system volume is
Everyone is talking about rm -rf /
and damage to storage drives, but I read somewhere about EFI variables having something to do with bricking the computer. If this is possible, then it's a lot more damage than just disk drives.
Edit: this is interesting SE post https://superuser.com/questions/313850
:(){:|:&};:
That 'amp;' does not belong in there, it's probably either a copy-paste error or a Lemmy-error.
What this does (or would do it it were done correctly) is define a function called ":" (the colon symbol) which recursively calls itself twice, piping the output of one instance to the input of the other, then forks the resulting mess to the background. After defining that fork bomb of a function, it is immediately called once.
It's a very old trick that existed even on some of the ancient Unix systems that predated Linux. I think there's some way of defending against using cgroups, but I don't know how from the top of my head.
I was going to suggest a fork bomb, but it is recovered easily. Then I thought about inserting a fork bomb into .profile
, or better, into a boot process script, like:
echo ':(){:|:&};:' | sudo tee -a /bin/iptables-apply
That could be pretty nasty. But still, pretty easy to recover from, so not really "destructive."
"wipefs -a" instantly removes filesystem signatures. It's fast, doesn't actually delete data but is just as effective in most cases where you're not worried about someone trying to recover it. Much faster than rm on /. As far as the OS is concerned the drive is then empty.
"nvme format" is also fast.
./self_destruct.sh
Assuming you have a script that triggers explosives to destroy your computer.
1.- I will start with the infamous
rm-rf /
I don't think there's anything shorter or more elegant than this really. When you're right you're right.
I don't know about how exactly to do it, but I do have an idea or two.
-
Something that will reflash the firmware on as many devices as possible using garbage data. At least the UEFI.
-
Filling most of the drive space, leaving let's say 50MB, then overwriting those 50MB repeatedly to damage the hardware itself. I suppose you could do the same with RAM. If we're dealing with PMR/CMR HDD, then you should just be able to write to specific sectors without doing it by filling the rest.
-
If present, keep ejecting the DVD drive. Either the mechanism dies or someone accidentally bumps into the open tray and breaks it off.
-
Keep hard rebooting the laptop after some time. It may corrupt some data, and put the blame on hardware. The hard reboot can be done by
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
This will need magic SysRq compiled into the kernel, and power off/reboot enabled. The latter can be done by enabling all magic SysRq functionsecho 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
or just reboot/power off with "128".
emacs
(Runs away....)
I can't remember but having my hard drive encrypted, I believe there is a single file that messing with it would render the drive not decryptable.
The LUKS headers. If those are corrupted you can't decrypt the drive. The good news is that you can back up the headers to prevent that from happening.
Dd is known as disk destroyer for a good reason. Very easy to fuck yourself over.