this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Damn, it is actually scary that they managed to pull this off. The backdoor came from the second-largest contributor to xz too, not some random drive-by.
It would be nice if we could press formal charges
Assuming that it's just that person, that it's their actual name and that they're in the US...
~~there will be federal investigation~~ just speculation if the culprit is a foreign actor
Do you have a source for this?
I don't have a source but I think it is safe to say given the large corporations and government institutions that rely on XZ utils. I'm sure Microsoft, Amazon, redhat ect are in talks with the federal government about this
Source: they made it up
updated my post, it was just some speculation i misread
They've been contributing to xz for two years, and commited various "test" binary files.
It's looking more like a long game to compromise an upstream.
Either that or the attacker was very good at choosing their puppet…
Well the account is focused on one particular project which makes sense if you expect to get burned at some point and don't want all your other exploits to be detected. It looks like there was a second sock puppet account involved in the original attack vector support code.
We should certainly audit other projects for similar changes from other psudoanonymous accounts.
Yeah, and the 700 commits should be reverted… just in case we missed something.
That is a should be standard procedure
Time to audit all their contributions although it looks like they mostly contribute to xz. I guess we'll have to wait for comments from the rest of the team or if the whole org needs to be considered comprimised.