XZ Hack - "If this timeline is correct, it’s not the modus operandi of a hobbyist. [...] It wouldn’t be surprising if it was paid for by a state actor."
XZ Hack - "If this timeline is correct, it’s not the modus operandi of a hobbyist. [...] It wouldn’t be surprising if it was paid for by a state actor."
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career. Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of
Thought this was a good read exploring some how the "how and why" including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.
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Imagine finding a backdoor within 45 day of it's release into a supply chain instead of months after infection. This is a most astoundingly rapid discovery.
Fedora 41 and rawhide, Arch, a few testing and unstable debian distributions and some apps like HomeBrew were affected. Not including Microsoft and other corporations who don't disclose their stack.
What a time to be alive.
Source: https://turnoff.us/
Arch was never affected, as described in their news post about it. Arch users had malicious code on their hard disks, but not the part that would have called into it.
Consider this the exception to the rule. There's no reason we should assume this timeline is the norm.
True. Though remarkable is still remarkable.
Notably, the timeline post-discovery is still stellar, regardless of Microsoft/GitHub cock-blocking analysis.
Disguising the virus as a corrupted test file then 'uncorrupting' it is crazy
