Once a hacker cracks into a system, his next goal is to get root, or give himself the highest level of access on the machine. The hacker can use little-known commands to get root, or can search the documents in the system's hard drive for a file or e-mail message that contains the system administrator's password.
Armed with root access, he can create legitimate-looking user accounts and log in whenever he wants without attracting attention. He can also alter or delete system logs to erase any evidence (such as command lines) that he gained access to the system.
But a hacker doesn't need root access to affect a system. He can misroute traffic intended to go to one company's Web server to a different one. Or, exploiting a well-documented bug (for which there's a patch that many sites haven't applied), a hacker can replace any Web page with his own text using a simple set of UNIX commands typed into the browser's Address bar.
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