Direct device access dangers (cont)

Raw access to hard drive

Read access (group 'disk' for example)

Good for backups with 'dump'
Can let you read /etc/shadow (bad)
Can let you scouer swap space for passwords, etc

Write access (root only)

Can let you modify /etc/shadow
Can let you repartition hard drive
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=10240