Getting Hacked Through Your Terminal

A recent Slashdot article alerted me to an old problem of people dumping escape sequences into an apache log, causing all sorts of Bad Things to happen if someone reads the log file in a terminal. I love reading log files, so this was a concern. I use SecureCRT, which is not supposed to be vulnerable. The cool thing is that in one of the Article’s comments, it was suggested that instead of using #tail -f /logfile to use #less +F /logfile, which opens the file in less, but behaves like tail and removes any escape sequences. Plus, I can move around in the file while I’m watching it.