File Permissions

Please do not give your files and directories public write permissions.  People do bad things with them.

I suggest setting your umask at least to 022, this will automatically take away public and group write permissions for any files and directories you create.

Today, I had to clean up several dozen user web pages which were publicly writable and had been vandalized to include malicious JavaScript code.  These modifications were made possible by users setting permissions on their files allowing public write.