On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 4:19 PM, Keith Keller kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us wrote:
On C5 the default appears to be:-
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1220 Jan 31 03:04 shadowIt is much more likely that someone has screwed up your system. I think even CentOS 4 had shadow as 400. And what on earth would the point be in having a world-readable shadow file?!? The whole point of having a shadow file is to keep password hashes out of /etc/passwd so that people can't read it. It would be nonsensical to then make the shadow file readable.
Yes, /etc/shadow would have always been readable only by root by default. The interesting question here is whether an intruder did it, clumsily leaving evidence behind, or whether it is just a local change from following some bad advice about things that need to be changed - or running some script to make those changes. The latter seems more likely to me.