Security: Local Security Still a Problem

This is a little musing I have. Here I am in New York, sitting in a training class, and I am sitting at the one PC that is "broken". Of course my curiosity gets the better of me, and I turn the "broken" PC on to see what is wrong. To my suprise, its not broken, but it is using Linux instead of the SOE approved Windows. So I want to get into it so I can actually follow along in the sessions (yes, this is my real motivation). So how do I do it.

To my suprise, Grub is not locked down. So I go into the Grub menu, pass a "1" as a Kernel argument to launch into single user mode. Once I get my shell prompt, I created my user, ran passwd to create a password, then ran "init 5" to go into the graphical interface. So here I am, typing this blog entry on the "broken" PC. This just goes to show you how big of a problem local security can be, where an outside user can go in physically and create a user account and have full access to a system. Lesson learned, lock down your boot loader.