Hacking isn’t exactly an easy thing to do as it involves computer and coding know-how for it to work. So it comes as a surprised that there is an easy way to break into most Linux-powered PCs.
According to two security researches from the Cybersecurity Group at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, they’ve found that it is possible to bypass any kind of authentication and take control of a locked-down computer that runs Linux by pressing the backspace key 28 times.
This is a bug in Grub2, a bootloader used to initialize “most Linux systems”. The way it works is that hitting the backspace key 28 times causes an error in the systems’ memory that launches the “Grub rescue shell”. Doing so would allow you to gain access to the computer’s data, allowing the individual to do whatever they wish with the computer.
Based on the researchers’ findings, this bug can only be triggered by hitting the backspace key exactly 28 times. This is because, as the researchers find out after they studied the code underlying the bootloader, that “the number of backspaces hits was the only input controllable by the user to cause different manifestations of the error”.
Upon discovery of this bug, the researches have made a patch that prevents the error that triggers the bug from occuring. Since then, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian have released patches to fix this particular issue.
Source : Motherboard
