Hi,

The 'yes' on #1 and #2 is okay, but the 'yes' on #3 would concern me a bit. Example, a spammer signs up on the same server, registers as a customer on one of the E-commerce sites we run, and in the confirmation email is now the UID, which is safer than 'username' to the general public, but it's not rocket-science for this (new) spammer to check the email hdrs, see it is from the same server, and convert the UID back to a username. Still, using the UID is much, much better than before.

I guess the 'yes' on #4, with the qualified 'hack necessary' would be the case for any sort of 'conversion' of the username. I wonder if we should look into the crypt() function as someone suggested ?

Try this (the $ is the system prompt):

$ grep 3214 /etc/passwd | head

This will show you the usernames/UID/GUIDs of all the users on your system (with a UID/GUID that m/3214/ to limit the result set as you have 32K users on that box)

I do have shell access, but I'd best ask the sysadmin/hosts if I can do that first, as I don't know if they would approve of it or not (I don't know if it would be considered suspect activity or not ??).

Thanks,

Peter

In reply to Re^5: Can the username be represented differently ? by peterr
in thread Can the username be represented differently ? by peterr

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