⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻WARNING: Malicious code in current pre-release & testing versions/variants: F40 and rawhide affected - users of F40/rawhide need to respond
Possibly linuxI’m genuinely disturbed that a person who was a core developer could just go rogue.
danFrom what I’ve been reading, it sounds like they were malicious from the very beginning. The work to integrate the malware goes back to 2021. boehs.org/…/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo…
It’s an extremely sophisticated attack that was hidden very well, and was only accidentally discovered by someone who noticed that rejected SSH connections (eg invalid key or password) were using more CPU power and taking 0.5s longer than they should have. mastodon.social/…/112180406142695845
Moonrise2473From that post, commits set to UTC+0800 and activity between UTC 12-17 indicate that the programmer wasn’t operating from California but from another country starting with C. The name is also another hint.
StarDreamerAccording to this post, the person involved exposed a different name at one point.
boehs.org/…/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo…
Cheong is not a Pingyin name. It uses Romanization instead. Assuming that this isn’t a false trail (unlikely, why would you expose a fake name once instead of using it all the time?) that cuts out China (Mainland) and Singapore which use the Pingyin system. Or somebody has a time machine and grabbed this guy before 1956.
Likely sources of the name would be a country/Chinese administrative zone that uses Chinese and Romanization. Which gives us Taiwan, Macau, or Hong Kong, all of which are in GMT+8. Note that two of these are technically under PRC control.
Realistically I feel this is just a rogue attacker instead of a nation state. The probability of China 1. Hiring someone from these specific regions 2. Exposing the full name once on purpose is extremely low. Why bother with this when you have plenty of graduates from Tsinghua in Beijing? Especially after so many people desperate for jobs after COVID.