| There is the mental function signalling "hang on, you're about to do something unsafe. Are you sure you want to do this?" But I think there are some scenarios where it serves a practical security purpose as well: - You're in an office, went away to grab a coffee and left the screen unlocked (bad!). Without sudo, a malicious person could indeed quickly install a backdoor or keylogger and take over your system. - you're executing a third-party script on your user account. Without a password prompt, that script could trivially escalate its privileges by embedding sudo commands. With a password prompt, you'll hopefully stop and ask yourself why the script is asking for your password. Basically, you actually cannot assuming that every running on a user account is really authorised by that user. So asking for the password is an attempt to reaffirm that it's really the user who gave that command. > If an attacker is already in the system, it can install key logger and whatnot without the root password. Yes, but that would require the attacker to, well, run sudo... |