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cdc_linux_notes.md

CDC Linux Intro

When it comes to competitions, several of the machines the team will be responsible for will running Linux. Often it's older versions of common of Linux distros such as Ubuntu 14.04.

Getting Around

There are very basic commands that will be necessary in order to navigate your machine.

  1. ls - Lists the contents of the current directory. To show all files, use ls -al.
  2. pwd - Shows your current directory
  3. cd - Changes your current directory. cd ~, cd /, cd /etc/
  4. mkdir - Makes a new directory mkdir test, mkdir -p a/test/dir
  5. rm - Deletes a file (add -rf to delete a directory)
  6. find - Find a file
  7. locate - Easy way to find a file
  8. touch - Create an empty file touch file.txt
  9. cat - Print the contents of a file to stdout
  10. grep - Search a file for a string grep 'string' file.c
  11. ps - Shows running processes -- ps auxf for tree structure
  12. kill - Kill a process kill -9 $PID
  13. who - Show who is signed in
  14. echo - Print to stdout -- echo 'This a test'
  15. lsof - See all open file descriptors
  16. tail -f - Watch the end of a file
  17. watch - Run a command at specified intervals

Identifying your box

There are a few ways to find out what distro you're on, the name of the machine, and the machine's IP address

  1. uname -a - Prints the kernel version and more
  2. hostname - Prints the system hostname
  3. ifconfig - Shows the IP address
  4. ip addr - The new way to show IP address
  5. cat /etc/os-release - Shows various information about the system

Managing services

There will be certain services that need to be running throughout a competition. It will be good to know how to manage them. The tool used to manage services on newer Linux systems is called systemctl, part of the systemd suite of utilities.

  • stop - Stops a service
  • restart - Restarts a service
  • start - Starts a service
  • status - Shows whether a service is running/stopped/failed
  • list-unit - Shows all services and more
  • reboot - Reboot the machine

Ways to be pwned

Once a malicious actor has had root access on your Linux machine, that machine cannot be trusted. The right thing to do would be to start fresh and be better at prevention in the future. Unfortunately, that's not possible during a competition. Here's a few really nasty ways an attacker could mess with you.

  • Adding malicious things to /etc/crontab. These will run at specified intervals (every minute, 5 minutes, every hour at :05, etc.)
  • Putting fake binaries on your $PATH
    • sudo so that anyone who runs sudo gets root
    • passwd so that you can't change passwords or passwords get logged
  • malicious systemd services or timers
  • modifications to ~/.*rc files

Learning more

  • man -- try man man
  • linuxjourney.com (External link)
  • JMU Unix Users Group
  • --help flag to commands
  • apropos to search for commands
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