Let’s keep in mind that if this is a state actor or some sort of global organized crime, then they don’t put all their eggs into one basket. If that’s the case, they’re going to have a bunch of other plans and backdoor attempts ongoing. This isn’t the end and we can assume there’s something else somewhere that went unnoticed.
Security is a constantly changing war of attrition, not a goal/product/configuration.
If anything it highlights how great open source actually is when it comes to security. People saw it and immediately flagged it.
I don’t think this one counts as a big win to be honest It was just freakish luck
It’s definitely freakish luck but at least it got found out. A closed source software would have gone through unnoticed.
the fact that it was found by luck, not methodically, to me implies that there probably are other backdoors we didn’t get lucky with.
Or found out in corporate code review / pentest. We just don’t know. I get that we want to say FOSS is great due to the “many eyes/shallow bugs” thing, but that didn’t work for OpenSSL or log4j. The fact that it did now is great, but let’s not get carried away. It was just pure luck.
Dude, the issue was found purely by coincidence, it very nearly made it through
Yes, but it didn’t. Has it made it through on closed software? Who knows?
My takeaway is more like: This one almost made it through and was caught by accident. How much more backdoors actually were not caught and made it through? I would bet some money on it being more than 0 :(
Yep for sure. But open source at least let’s you examine every part of the ecosystem.
No software is perfect even if all contributors have good intentions and do all due diligence.
Throw some malice and there is a chance something will get through.
Im not sure why it being caught by accident is a factor here.
If devs knew what the pitfalls were before coding, there wouldn’t be security risks in software.
Hackers do the same thing. They pen test, and if by chance they find something, they exploit it.
Yes, probabky, but also might be possible to now find.
Also this was a multi year effort that employed very complex knowledge. And still didn’t get thru.
If it’s multi year and very complex it’s telling that this is what it takes. The bar is very high.
Lost me at suggesting that we run EDR on prod Linux servers.
Literally installing a backdoor intentionally…wow
Smug users who don’t run systemd be like…
Laughs in Alpine
How does systemd solve this?
The exploit only happens in systemd
Wish I could be a fly on the walk when the bad actor realized years of work has just gone down the drain
Probably fear, then subsequently followed by their brains next to you on said wall. Whichever government paid for a multi-year campaign to backdoor enterprise Linux distributions is not going to be happy about this failure.
