Danger Will Robinson
Posted by Rick DeNatale Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:23:00 GMT
Ruby has a nifty method in kernel called open. It’s quite powerful in the way it interprets its first argument, a string telling it what to open. It can open a file, or it can open a pipe to a sub-process it creates to run a command in that string. It takes quite a bit of open function has a similar interpretation of it’s first argument. Again it takes quite a bit of documentation to describe.
Which is a cause for concern. Most things that powerful can be misused.
I use an application called Awstats to get statistics on my websites. Awstats is a very popular application which is written in perl.
But I long ago disallowed access to Awstats from the outsite world after I found that my system had been compromised by a bad guy exploiting perl’s open function.
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