/etc/group question: What if there's a :: ???

[Ken Staggers]

Hello-

  We recently added a new subgroup to our system for our lab assistants.
In the process, we discovered that some of the fields looked like this:

operator::5:
stude::7:student1,student2
staff::10:person1,person2,person3


So we placed stars in between the colons because that was the way it was
for all other sub group listings.  So now they look like this:

operator:*:5:
stude:*:7:student1,student2
staff:*:10:person1,person2,person3

Was this a security hole that we just plugged up?  The file is only world
readable, so there's no way anyone could edit the file.  Does it make a
difference whether there are stars between the first colon (especially
since this is not the passwd file).

Please e-mail your responses.

--Ken Staggers
  Chief UNIX Lab Assistant
  St John Fisher College
  (..!rutgers!rochester!cci632!sjfc!assist)