The power cable would like to have a word.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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We have squid games at home.
Squid games at home:
objdump -D * | less
while this is not real, something similar in principal very much was! (but not too widespread)
see here or look up "casino dos malware"
uh in short it erases "the disk's" (unsure which) file allocation table (pretty much the dos/windows version of a superblock). apparently some versions did copy it to memory and give the user a chance though!
Has "let's play a game" vibes
Reminder that binaries cannot change a shell's working directory, so the non-mines will do nothing.
(cd is a shell builtin)
I mean, you can just write a whole custom shell for this
Technically they could if run as root by modifying the parent process
Good point. Also it wouldnβt stop you from just opening another terminal window haha.
Reminds me of gameshell, which is a rogue-like game designed to teach you the unix shell. So instead of navigating with NESW, you cd to locations. At one point you search the "garden", which is an unmanageable tangle of directories, with find.
Based on the responses in this thread, I feel like you could present this screenshot with a "I bet you couldn't find your way out of this!" and a zip of the directory, and a significant number of users would voluntarily download it and extract it just to "prove that they could".
Well yeah? And you do it in a vm. But seems like a decently simple problem anyway. ls -al and compare the sizes.
Obvioulsy whoever set this minefield thought about this
Genuinely my first response. What are VMs for?
strings 1
They never guess the next move: Unplugs pc
loud knocking on the door
Either that or the PC keeps running anyway.
Boston Dynamics: βEither that or the PC keeps running away.β
\cd ~
what does this change?
Bypasses aliases and uses the original command
When people don't know normal things we learned in '92, I get worried.
Combat the minefield with a fork bomb. Ainβt no process surviving this engagement.
cat 1
Iβll hit them with an rm /etc. We go out, we go out together and on my terms.
How can you prevent users from leaving a directory?
chroot, and override exit with an alias,could work
Magic, I guess, 'cause nothing in the sceenshot would do it, unless the attacker had already replaced cat with a trojan or something.
AFAIK, thereβs no way to without modifying the system tools and shell.
How can you prevent a shutdown using a power key?
There's an Emacs command to do that
C-x M-c M-minefield
You could probably install a handler for the event that's triggered when the power button is pressed. Most OSes do that and pop up a graceful shutdown options window. Most hardware will have a hard shutdown option when you hold the power button for a few seconds. You would probably have to overwrite the BIOS or something at that level to prevent that way out.
You could also just unplug it.
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You can't, lol. Think it's just a joke
Encrypt hard drive and keep the key in RAM. Could be recovered with a cold boot attack but that's very advanced. The DOS virus ONEHALF would run as a daemon encrypring a block on the drive on each boot and intercept reads/writes to the encrypted part as if nothing ever happened. Only after encrypting Β½ of the disk, it would reveal itself with an ominous
Dis is one half.
Press any key to continue...
The decryption was eventually cracked by ESET and they developed a tool to recover the drive.
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I can think of a way out:
Just throw the whole PC away. It's someone else's problem now!
But that just becomes a Jumanji issue
But it's on a dedicated server you have already paid for, which also hosts your own Minecraft game server with active players (mission-critical process which can never be allowed to stop).
Maybe something like find ./ -type f | xargs md5sum, then avoid the one directory where the executable has a different checksum. Heck, even find | ls might suffice.
This could be trivially defeated by a program which erases the hard drive unless run using a particular executable name. Then, all twenty entries could simply be hard links to the same executable file on disk, but one of the names would trigger different behavior.
So then you either cat the executable and hope itβs a shell script, you output the binary with a hex viewer and compare, you modify the executable so itβs in a lower permission group and thus wouldnβt have access to erase the drive, thereβs like a hundred ways to solve this.
Does it have a perpetual energy source if I unplug it?
There was an old virus that would copy your FAT table to ram, erase it from disk, and preset you with a slot machine UI where you would gamble to get the FAT back, if you won, great, the virus would write the FAT back to the drive, if not, you lost everything.
Rebooting without playing meant loosing everything.
FAT Table
Can I just pay? I can go to the ATM Machine and enter my PIN Number
You forget that FAT stands for "File Allocation Travesty."
Diabolical!
ctrl-D
ls -lah
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