CHMOD Big Oops!

[Richard Scott McNew]

On 10/24/06, Gabriel Gunderson <gabe at gundy.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 22:27 -0600, David D Turley wrote:
> > Ok, lets say I "accidently" executed the command:
> >
> > chmod -R 777 .
> >
> > from the root directory.  What do I need to do to re-secure my system
> > and undo this big oops?
>
> Unless you had a database of file permissions (intrusion detection often
> does this) before the "big oops", I don't see anyway to bring this back
> to a sane state.  Bad file permissions are a huge security risk.  I'd
> look at re-installing.  Sorry.
>
>
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I'm not sure if it would solve all of your permission problems, but I'd try:

find / -type f -exec chmod 600 '{}' \; find / -type d -exec chmod 700 '{}' \;

before moving straight to a re-install.