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.