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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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To address the "why":
A user account, as defined by a username/password combination, can be used to access resources on the machine without logging in interactively on that machine. In a perfect world, you would only ever log in interactively on the machine using an account with restricted permissions, and when you needed to do "administraty" things, you would provide separate admin credentials at that time (sudo, runas, whatever your OS of choice supports).
If someone is able to compromise that root user on Machine A, then they may be able to leverage Machine A as a platform to attack any other devices on your network, or make Machine A into a zombie in their bot army to attack other targets anywhere, send spam, whatever malicious shenanigans they desire. (I know that's pretty simplistic, there's a whole lot of details left out, but that's the gist of it.)