What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

[Kaz]

Quote

On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it. They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

ARSTECHNICA.COM

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Malicious updates made to a ubiquitous tool were a few weeks away from going mainstream.

 

It was implemented on some unstable builds, (Like Kali experimental) so if you have an unstable Linux build, make sure it has been updated.  This is a few days old, but since it hasn't been mentioned I thought I'd bring it up. 

Edited April 9, 2024 by bonami2

[bonami2]

2 minutes ago, Kaz said:

What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

ARSTECHNICA.COM

---

Malicious updates made to a ubiquitous tool were a few weeks away from going mainstream.

 

It was implemented on some unstable builds, (Like Kali experimental) so if you have an unstable Linux build, make sure it has been updated.  This is a few days old, but since it hasn't been mentioned I thought I'd bring it up. 

Great post  

[ENTERPRISE]

Yowzer, talk about a great way to get widespread propagation easily by using a common utility.