[TallGuyShort]

    $ login -n root
    Login incorrect
    login: backdoor
    No home directory specified in password file!
    Logging in with home=/
    #

I don't agree with the interpretation that Sam tried and failed to login as root, and THEN tried to login as a different user, backdoor. Because if that's what happened, shouldn't there be another $ prompt before he types `backdoor` and gets the #? It seems to me that's an unobfuscated password field and `backdoor` is the password.

[JdeBP]

No. After the 'Login incorrect' (or equivalent on non-Solaris systems) message, login(1) loops around back to prompting for the user name afresh. Try it.

What's unusual here is rather the missing password prompt after 'login root', which is presumably what the fictional -n option (non-existent in BSD or Solaris login) is suppressing.

* https://illumos.org/man/1/login

* https://man.netbsd.org/login.1

[3RTB297]

At some point we all have to remember that the monitor showing these commands is also an actor, and not actually a computer hooked up to a special laser that scans your body, destroys it, and pulls you into a 1980's era computer still managing to have, per the screenshot in the blog post, about 4GB of memory free in some respect.

Same as how Garrett Hedlund is neither a youthful stock owner in a computer company, nor intrinsically knows Unix shell commands.

[argee]

Maybe it's a compromised sshd that dropped him in after printing the "Login incorrect".

[celsius1414]

I also wouldn’t put it past Flynn to rename ‘root’ to ‘backdoor’ as a joke.