An urgent linux backdoor was discovered entirely by accident this week – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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An “urgent” Linux backdoor was discovered entirely by accident this week.

Red Hat urgently warned this week that recent beta versions of Fedora operating systems contained malicious code for backdoor access. Debian issued a similar warning.

A blog post from security firm Deepfactor points out that Microsoft developer Andres Freund notified the Linux security Openwall Project after stumbling on the exploit. On Mastodon, Freund said discovering it “really required a lot of coincidences,” starting with him probing curiously high CPU usage by an SSH process.

A screenshot of Andres Freund’s post detailing what led him to investigate.
Thank goodness for Freund’s memory.
Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
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