I've just found a pretty ugly hole in view-source cgi-shell script. This script, which can be found on some httpd distributions and in SCO Skunkware cdroms, is designed to display a given document located in $DOCUMENT_ROOT/$1 (where $DOCUMENT_ROOT is an environment variable set by the server). Unhopefully view-source does not properly check the arguments. It is therefore possible to display any file on systems where view-source is world executable by sending something like 'http://www.server.com/cgi-bin/view-source?../../../../../../../etc/passwd' Obviously this kind of so-called cgi has nothing to do in your cgi-bin directory... Maybe a day cgi will be secure ;)