inotify

3 Articles

This Week In Security: ShinyHunters Won’t Dox The FBI, Pentagon Data Stolen, And OBS Vulnerable

October 2, 2026 by 5 Comments

404 Media reports that the ShinyHunters group who stole multiple terabytes of FBI employee data say they do not plan to release the data.

Known for ransomware and extortion of innumerable companies and government agencies, ShinyHunters used a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to compromise the employment site of the FBI and pivot into scraping the content of FBI AWS instances, claiming to have the full employment and health data of all FBI agents, employees, and spouses.

The hacker group took exception to an FBI press release that claimed that the group over-stated stolen data and that they directly harass victims and victim’s families.  The group publicized the FBI data breach, demanding a retraction of the statements, and it was generally assumed that the group would follow their typical methods of releasing the data publicly if the demands were not met.

The group has told 404 media that they had always agreed internally to not release the stolen data, saying “This was all a marketing campaign to protect our business and actively combat disinformation”.  Meanwhile the FBI continues the investigation, and Shiny Hunters may be hoping to defer some of the ire.

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Linux Fu: Easier File Watching

January 31, 2019 by 22 Comments

In an earlier installment of Linux Fu, I mentioned how you can use inotifywait to efficiently watch for file system changes. The comments had a lot of alternative ways to do the same job, which is great. But there was one very easy-to-use tool that didn’t show up, so I wanted to talk about it. That tool is entr. It isn’t as versatile, but it is easy to use and covers a lot of common use cases where you want some action to occur when a file changes.

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Linux Fu: Watch That Filesystem

June 7, 2018 by 31 Comments

The UNIX Way™ is to cobble together different, single-purpose programs to get the effect you want, for instance in a Bash script that you run by typing its name into the command line. But sometimes you want the system to react to changes in the system without your intervention. For example, you might like to watch a directory and kick off some program automatically when a file appears from a completed FTP transaction, without having to sit there and refresh the directory yourself.

The simple but ugly way to do this just scans the directory periodically. Here’s a really dumb shell script:

#!/bin/bash
while true
 do
   for I in `ls`
    do cat $I; rm $I
   done
 sleep 10
done

Just for an example, I dump the file to the console and remove it, but in real life, you’d do something more interesting. This is really not a good script because it executes all the time and it just isn’t a very elegant solution. (If you think I should use for I in *, try doing that in an empty directory and you’ll see why I use the ls command instead.)

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