I'm sorry if you didn't like that specific link -- I am happy to provide others: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/36901 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33

I'm sorry if you didn't like that specific link -- I am happy to provide others: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/36901 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33412 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33412 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37806 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34405 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37036 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37806 those were just from 2 minutes of googling, and only ones for 2009. Regarding your second point, security is all about having multiple layers, but the truth is the effectiveness of having code run in non-root users is a useless precaution in this day and age. My point is that people always talk about their great uptime on their servers, without realizing how insanely insecure modern kernels and operating systems are -- unless you are upgrading every month, there is most likely a well known local privilege escalation vulnerability on your machine. Once they have root, hackers can do all kinds of fun things, like replacing your SSH binary and logging all your passwords. As Luke mentions above, if a sysadmin's workstation is ever hacked into, the implications can quickly become immense.