This doesn't seem conceptually different from running

    [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] = 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "Click"

on your employer's production server, and the liability doesn't seem murky in either case

▲ staticassertion 12 hours ago | parent [-]

What if you wrote something more like:

    # terrible code, never use ty
    def cleanup(dir):
      system("rm -rf {dir}")


    def main():
        work_dir = os.env["WORK_DIR"]
        cleanup(work_dir)

and then due to a misconfiguration "$WORK_DIR" was truncated to be just "/"?

At what point is it negligent?

▲

direwolf20 12 hours ago | parent [-]

This is not hypothetical. Steam and Bumblebee did it.

▲

extraduder_ire 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That was the result of an additional space in the path passed to rm, IIRC.

Though rm /$TARGET where $TARGET is blank is a common enough footgun that --preserve-root exists and is default.

	▲	niyikiza 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You'd be surprised to see how often we're seeing those types of semantic attack vulnerabilities in Agent frameworks: https://niyikiza.com/posts/map-territory/
	▲	cyberax 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even better, $TARGET might be "/home/user/documents and settings /bin"

▲

a_t48 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Bungie, too, in a similar way.