There was just a news story on Sky UK about a man who said he entered the "code" rm -rf into his Web browser and it instantly wiped his system and all his Web servers and client websites around the world, including all backups.
Sky were warning people not to enter this "rogue code" into their browser.
I just couldn't stop laughing at this completely stupid story that obviously had no research done.
Anyone with any Linux and SSH experience would instantly recognise this as a standard Linux command, but of course using the -rf prefix is dangerous because it will instantly wipe a whole system without warning and then crash the system because it deleted all the important files.
It won't however do anything typed into a Web browser. The man they reported about would need to be at a Linux command line or logged in as the root admin via SSH for this command to work. And even then it would just wipe that server, not other stuff across the Internet.
And if it wiped his backups then more the fool him for keeping them on the same system as the websites.
The man being reported was said to be running a small web hosting company. Who claims he has lost everything and his business is in effect dead, including all his clients losing their websites. Sounds like he didn't really know what he was doing.
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