How one man accidentally stopped a potentially massive cyberattack
Linux. Photo: David Sillitoe/The Guardian
How was your Easter holiday? Have you made good use of it, for example by preventing a globally destructive cyber attack? No? Then try harder.
This weekend, a tentative, long-standing, and near-successful attempt to put a backdoor in a widely used piece of open-source software was foiled - essentially by accident. From Dan Goodin of Ars Technica:
Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that found its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian.Because the backdoor was discovered before the malicious versions of xz Utils were ...