fork bomb attack

[Dave Jones]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 11:04:03AM -0800, Florin Andrei wrote:
 > http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/308?ref=rssdebia
 > 
 > Quotes:
 > "I wrote up a very simple bourne shell script on my work machine, which
 > runs Mandrake Linux, and executed it under my non-privileged account.
 > Within seconds, the machine was brought to its knees -- totally crippled
 > and unusable. I stared at my screen in disbelief for a few moments,
 > totally stunned with what had just happened."

The only news here is that securityfocus really will print any crap thats submitted.
I look forward to the followup article.

"I was stunned that I could just pull the power cable out of the wall
 and Linux would do nothing to prevent this denial of service".

man ulimit

If we set strict ulimits by default we'd have people writing articles like
"Fedora is teh suck, I can't malloc more than xMB in a single process"
What's fit for one configuration may not be for another.
One size most definitly does not fit all.

		Dave