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Community Bot
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So upon working on an old Linux system that hadn't been touched in a while, I ran into an issue related to having 32-bit Google Chrome installed. I found this questionthis question that the original poster answered in the form of a one-line bash script. While I don't have any suspicion that the original answer would have been malicious, I did notice that the answer had been edited since then, and if nobody was paying close attention, a malicious edit could have made its way into the terminals of potentially hundreds of people.

What kind of protections are in place, and what should be added, to mitigate the risk of an existing popular and accepted answer (i.e. top of Google results) that consists of a single long piece of code from being edited into something malicious? Some bash commands can look innocent, only to redirect output into something that would end up overwriting something important, for example.

So upon working on an old Linux system that hadn't been touched in a while, I ran into an issue related to having 32-bit Google Chrome installed. I found this question that the original poster answered in the form of a one-line bash script. While I don't have any suspicion that the original answer would have been malicious, I did notice that the answer had been edited since then, and if nobody was paying close attention, a malicious edit could have made its way into the terminals of potentially hundreds of people.

What kind of protections are in place, and what should be added, to mitigate the risk of an existing popular and accepted answer (i.e. top of Google results) that consists of a single long piece of code from being edited into something malicious? Some bash commands can look innocent, only to redirect output into something that would end up overwriting something important, for example.

So upon working on an old Linux system that hadn't been touched in a while, I ran into an issue related to having 32-bit Google Chrome installed. I found this question that the original poster answered in the form of a one-line bash script. While I don't have any suspicion that the original answer would have been malicious, I did notice that the answer had been edited since then, and if nobody was paying close attention, a malicious edit could have made its way into the terminals of potentially hundreds of people.

What kind of protections are in place, and what should be added, to mitigate the risk of an existing popular and accepted answer (i.e. top of Google results) that consists of a single long piece of code from being edited into something malicious? Some bash commands can look innocent, only to redirect output into something that would end up overwriting something important, for example.

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SimonT
SimonT
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Security against malicious script edits

So upon working on an old Linux system that hadn't been touched in a while, I ran into an issue related to having 32-bit Google Chrome installed. I found this question that the original poster answered in the form of a one-line bash script. While I don't have any suspicion that the original answer would have been malicious, I did notice that the answer had been edited since then, and if nobody was paying close attention, a malicious edit could have made its way into the terminals of potentially hundreds of people.

What kind of protections are in place, and what should be added, to mitigate the risk of an existing popular and accepted answer (i.e. top of Google results) that consists of a single long piece of code from being edited into something malicious? Some bash commands can look innocent, only to redirect output into something that would end up overwriting something important, for example.