I was trying to extract some files from a a Linux image of one of those ARM boards. It was packed into the cpio format, and I had never used the format before. Of course I was trying to extract to a root owned directory and I sudo’ed it. I effed up the command and overwrote all my system directories (/bin, /usr, /lib, etc…). Thankfully I had backed up my system recently and was able to get it working again.
No idea how that would work. An undocumented person at my mom’s work was “borrowing” someone else’s identity to get paid. So they were contributing to social security with no way to ever collect on it.
My favorite part of this thread is everyone just saying copy and paste the commands so it will work. Like we should totally get users into the habit of running random commands off the net as root.