Technologist vs spy: the xz backdoor debate
lcamtuf.substack.com
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.

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
      22·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      203·
      8 months ago

      Before resting on our laurels, we should consider it’s possible it’s more widespread but just not being disclosed until after it’s patched.

      It would be wise to be on the lookout for security patches for the next few days.

    • Lemmchen@feddit.de
      10·
      8 months ago

      Consider this the exception to the rule. There’s no reason we should assume this timeline is the norm.