Scan for SUID and SGID programs

Unfortunately, a poorly written SUID or SGID binary can be used to quickly and easily escalate a user's privileges. Also, an attacker who has already gained root access may hide SUID binaries throughout your system in order to leave a backdoor for future access. This leads us to the need for scanning systems for SUID and SGID binaries. This is a simple process and can be done with the following command:

# find / \( -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 \) -type f -exec ls -la {} \;

One important thing to consider is whether an SUID program is in fact a shell script rather than an executable, since it's trivial for someone to change an otherwise innocuous script into a backdoor. Most operating systems will ignore any SUID or SGID bits on a shell script, but if you want to find all SUID or SGID scripts on a system, change the argument to the -exec option in the last command and add a pipe so that the command reads:

# find / \( -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 \) \

  -type f -exec file {} \; | grep -v ELF

Now every time an SUID or SGID file is encountered, the file command will run and determine what type of file is being examined. If it's an executable, grep will filter it out; otherwise, it will be printed to the screen with some information about what kind of file it is. Most operating systems use ELF-format executables, but if you're running an operating system that doesn't (older versions of Linux used a.out, and AIX uses XCOFF), you'll need to replace the ELF in the previous grep command with the binary format used by your operating system and architecture. If you're unsure of what to look for, run the file command on any binary executable, and it will report the string you're looking for.