Some no-name came and without any problems asked to become a maintainer in a project used in almost any distro, took it over, put a backdoor in there and no one had any questions? In this case, everything turned out thanks to pure chance. Noname screwed up his backdoor, which attracted the attention of a guy from Microsoft, and out of boredom, he dug up what was what. And if I hadn’t messed up, or that guy from Microsoft decided to go drink beer instead of poking around in the xz code, then no one would have discovered anything. It’s scary to imagine how many of these nonames are sitting in all these thousands of open source projects, waiting in the wings to roll out a malicious patch.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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They noticed that some ssh sessions took 0.5 seconds too long under certain circumstances. 😲
Holy hell that's good QA.
Microsoft employee.
Don't see why you're being downvoted, the person in question who discovered this is a postgres maintainer employed by Microsoft.
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...
This is the best post I've read about it so far: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor
In the fallout, we learn a little bit about mental health in open source.
Reminded me of this, relevant as always, xkcd:
