Many people, in editing the root user's crontab, may not be mindful of the great security risks involved. I felt that it should be mentioned here that anyone who makes use of cron must be thoroughly cautious of the commands and programs that are to execute on a regular basis. Essentially, one should take precautions to ensure that the program/script/command executed by a user's crontab should be writable only by that particular user.
A sobering example is one in which a script is set to be run every x hours via the root user's crontab (/etc/crontab). If this script has its file permissions set such that any user can write to it, you have essentially provided a means for any user on your machine to execute any arbitrary command as root.
I realize that this may be obvious to some people, but for those who are not particularly mindful of computer security, it has hopefully drawn some awareness.
Comments (0)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20011214225541485