Emerald (she/her)Debian security amirite?
recapitatedThe xz infiltration is a proof of concept.
Anyone who is comforted by the fact they’re not affected by a particular release is misguided. We just don’t yet know the ways in which we are thoroughly screwed.
This is a huge wake up call to OSS maintainers that they need to review code a lot more thoroughly. This is far from the last time we’re going to see this, and it probably wouldn’t have been caught if the attacker hadn’t been sloppy
ulternoNah, I’d say the chap was pretty unsloppy.
Just that we were lucky that someone found it.
It’s a good thing that xz is a type of program that people may want to profile.
But this is an eye opener for people saying that Linux is “secure” (not more secure, but just secure .) because the code has many eyes on it.
This confirms my suspicion that we may be affected by the bystander effect, so we actually have less eyes than required for this.
It’s a rough balance when you’re trying to convince people unfamiliar with the internals (let alone non technical people) to make the switch. Saying “Linux is safe, but not bulletproof” may scare them back to the devil they know even if there’s no greater guarantee of safety there.
Of course, maybe I am being too hard on people by expecting everyone to put more thought into everything they make a decision for. But it is in fact the lack of thought that tends to cause problems in all areas we see nowadays.
But that’s a topic for somewhere else.
We can simply go by “Linux is more bulletproof than Windows”; instead of calling it “safe”, which would also be wrong.
The reason I consider this sloppy is because he altered default behavior. Done properly, an injection like this probably could have been done with no change to default behavior, and we’d be even less likely to have gotten lucky.
Looking back we can see all the signs pointing to it, but it still took a lot of getting lucky to find it.
I’ve always considered the “source is open so people can check for vulnerabilities” saying a bit ironic, because I’d bet 99% of us never look, nor could find it if we were looking. The bystander effect is definitely here as we all just assume someone else has audited it.
Done properly, an injection like this probably could have been done with no change to default behaviour,
Interesting.
So the sloppiness was in the implementation and not the social engineering.
But then of course, people tend to be not good at both, fooling people and fooling programmers/computers at the same time. In this case, the chap turned out to be better at fooling people than programmers/computers.
And I am being sloppy for not trying to learn enough about exploits even though I should have a good enough programming base to start it.
And to have strong and continuous analysis of software bills of materials.