Agreed, removing editors is a waste of time and just makes it difficult
to admin the system. For example given shell access, the command cat and
the re-direction operator '>' it is easy to edit a file.
1) Open the hacked box in an xterm
2) Enter 'cat target-file'
3) Select the text and copy to the editor of your choice on your
local system
4) Make whatever edits you want
5) Select the text in your editor
6) Returning to the shell on the target machine enter
'cat >target-file'
7) Paste the edited version of the file into the xterm
8) Exit cat with ^C
Using a techniques like this it is possible to do most things
that the hacker might want to do. Such as upload any useful files they might
want by pasting them into a new file.
Kind Regards,
David Pybus
