“It’s not a PC problem,” I said. “I don’t guess you know anything about the operating system called UNIX, do you?”
‘I wouldn’t call UNIX an operating system, Aunt Kay. It’s like calling it the weather when it’s really the environment, which is comprised of the weather and all the elements and the edifices. Are you using A-T an’ T?”
“Good God, Lucy. I don’t know.”
“Well, what are you running it on?”
“An NCR mini.` “Then it’s A-T an’ T.”
“I think someone might have broken security,” I said.
“It happens. But what makes you think it?”
“I found a strange file in my directory, Lucy. My directory and its files are secure – you shouldn’t be able to read anything unless you have my password.”
“Wrong. If you have root privileges, you’re the super user and can do anything you want and read anything you want.”
“My computer analyst is the only super user.”
“That may be true. But there may be a number of users who have root privileges, users you don’t even know about that came with the software. We can check that easily, but first tell me about the strange file. What’s it called and what’s in it?”
“It’s called t-t-y-oh-seven and there’s a sentence in it that reads: ‘I can’t find it.’
“I heard keys clicking.
“What are you doing?”
I asked.
“Making notes as we talk. Okay. Let’s start with the obvious. A big clue is the file’s name, t-t-y-oh-seven. That’s a device. In other words, t-t-y-oh-seven is probably somebody’s terminal in your office. It’s possible it could be a printer, but my guess is that whoever was in your directory decided to send a note to the device called t-t-y-oh-seven. But this person screwed up and instead of sending a note, he created a file.”
“When you write a note, aren’t you creating a file?” I puzzled.
“Not if you’re just sending keystrokes.”
“How?”
“Easy. Are you in UNIX now?”
“Yes.”
“Type cat redirect t-t-y-q -” “Wait a minute.”
“And don’t worry about the slash-dev ‘ “Lucy, slow down.”
“We’re deliberately leaving out the dev directory, which is what I’m betting this person did.”
“What comes after cat?”
“Okay. Cat redirect and the device “
“Please slow down.”
“You should have a four-eighty-six chip in that thing, Aunt Kay. Why’s it so slow?”
“It’s not the damn chip that’s slow!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lucy said sincerely. “I forgot.”
Forgot what? “Back to the problem,” she went on. “I’m assuming you don’t have a device called t-t-y-q, by the way. Where are you?”
“I’m still on cat,” I said, frustrated. “Then it’s redirect . . . Damn. That’s the caret pointing right?”
“Yes. Now hit return and your cursor will be bumped down to the next line, which is blank. Then you type the message you want echoed to t-t-y-q’s screen.”
“See Spot run,” I typed.
“Hit return and then do a control C,” Lucy said. “Now you can do an ls minus one and pipe it to p-g and you’ll see your file.”
I simply typed -Is- and caught a flash of something flying by.
“Here’s what I think happened,” Lucy resumed. “Someone was in your directory – and we’ll get to that in a minute. Maybe they were looking for something in your files and couldn’t find whatever it was. So this person sent a message, or tried to, to the device called t-t-y-oh-seven. Only he was in a hurry, and instead of typing cat redirect slash d-e-v slash t-t-y-oh-seven, he left out the dev directory and typed cat redirect t-t-y-oh-seven. So the keystrokes weren’t echoed on t-t-y-oh-seven’s screen at all. In other words, instead of sending a message to t-t-y-oh-seven, this person unwittingly created a file called t-t-y-oh-seven.”
“If the person had typed in the proper command and sent the keystrokes, would the message have been saved? “ I asked.
“No. The keystrokes would have appeared on t-t-yo-h-seven’s screen, and would have stayed there until the user cleared it. But you would have seen no evidence of this in your directory or anywhere else. There wouldn’t be a file.”
“Meaning, we don’t know how many times somebody might have sent a message from my directory, saying it was-done correctly.”