This is only a vulnerability if you don't know what ldd does. The problem is that it's not necessarily easy to find out what ldd does. The man pages for Solar

This is only a vulnerability if you don't know what ldd does. The problem is that it's not necessarily easy to find out what ldd does. The man pages for Solaris 8-10 will tell you not to run it on untrusted files. But, if you Google "man ldd" you may get this page (the first result for me, btw): http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?ldd+1 http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?ldd+1 Which is very sparse. If you are not an experienced SA you may not notice that the information is old, or not applicable to your platform. There are a lot of quasi-administrators (techy folk in your dept. w/ admin privileges) who may be vulnerable to social engineering by a consultant or evil employee (I've seen both happen). We are all vulnerable to what we don't know.