[wplug] bug, cosmic ray or security breach?

[John Harrold]

Sometime in January Alexandros Papadopoulos assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Dear all
| 
| I'm facing a weird situation with one of my (Debian) servers.
| After a power outage and the necessary reboot, some important
| system binaries started to segfault. These include /bin/grep, /bin/tar,
| /usr/bin/find and /usr/bin/perl.

 .... 

| Eagerly awaiting ideas for further investigation of the suspect binaries...

It sounds like a corrupted file. You can have two files where only one bit
is different and get a different md5sum with the same file size. If the
flipped bit occurred in a "nonstring" area (for lack of a better word) of
the data then you wouldn't see anything different by using strings. Is it
possible the file system is corrupt? Have you run fsck on it?


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