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As if a virus really needed administrator access for anything...

Maybe to fuck up your machine... but if they want to snoop on your passwords, encrypt your files, mine bitcoin, participate in a DoS attack... they can do that without elevating

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You could even replace every command I run with a malware version simply by altering the $PATH in ~/.bashrc. If you manage to replace, say, apt-get with a malware version, you'll get admin permissions every time I run `sudo apt-get ...`.

If your sudo is configured correctly it will have an administrator defined PATH. However if you have sudo price to run apt-get, anything that could manipulate your rc files can just run sudo apt-get on its own. No need to trick you.

Unless it doesn't have your password, and sudo is configured to require auth to elevate. This is the STIG requirement for this exact reason

Edit: of course, it could just manipulate the path to include it's own evil sudo wrapper, but the chess match always sounds like this.

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