Linux, the operating system for a vast number of computers, internet servers, and other devices all over the world, had a secret backdoor built into it. Andres Freund, a Microsoft programmer, found it and alerted the world to the insidious vulnerability. The World’s Carolyn Beeler talks with Andy Greenberg, a senior writer at Wired, about […]
A German Microsoft engineer uncovered a cyber attack that would have potentially allowed threat actors to access data from millions of unsuspecting users.
On 29 March 2024, an announcement was posted notifying the world that the Open-Source Software (OSS) package "xz-utils," which includes the xz data compression program and a library of software routines called "liblzma" and which is present in most Linux distributions, had been compromised. The insertion of the compromised code was done by "Jia Tan", the official maintainer of the xz-utils package.
The original maintainer of the xz Utils package, which was backdoored and almost distributed to production Linux systems, is yet to make any public co.