The /etc/shadow file stores a lot of important settings for passwords on Linux systems, ... Linux systems administrator, security engineer and Linux journalist for most of her 30-year career.

Linux vulnerabilities CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598 let local attackers extract sensitive data via SUID core dumps.

For modern Linux implementation ... Keep in mind, however, that without that salt value, someone looking at the shadow file would be able to tell which accounts were using the same password ...

The usermod command allows you to make a lot of different changes to user accounts without having to carefully edit files like /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group ...

Besides the four belonging to the Linux Kernel Organization ... The perpetrator also had copies of the /etc/shadow files, which overall contained 551 unique username and hashed password pairs.