When I was in the kernel group at Encore in 1990-91, I had a habit of never becoming root legitimately. Every time I needed to be root, I cracked it a new way a

When I was in the kernel group at Encore in 1990-91, I had a habit of never becoming root legitimately. Every time I needed to be root, I cracked it a new way and then patched the hole behind me. It got a bit harder over that time, but never really enough to slow down my regular work. The moral of the story is that, even without people deliberately creating ways to run arbitrary code as root, people who are merely oblivious to security leave plenty of holes.