W
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.
Update March 7th, 11PM ET: We have more details on the XZ Utils backdoor attempt right here.
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