Unlike the command, users typically supply their own password to rather than the root password.

Also see tomorrow's paper for scandal of how Linux user with root password deleted a file by mistake.

From there we could strip away the root passwords, letter by letter and bit by bit.

Using privilege escalation techniques, the root password in the passwd file could be edited, opening the box to further experimentation.

The other half comes from sysadmins that think they know everything about security because they have the root password.

One: the root password to the machine running Greg's rootkit.com site was either "88j4bb3rw0cky88" or "88Scr3am3r88".

To be fair, that is one awesomely long root password.

No root password needed to install software; packages are installed in system locations writable by that user.

Could have just been someone calling up Oracle and saying, "Hey, this is Ken, what's the root password?"

His root password on his system was five characters.