A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.
  • Q*Bert Reynolds@sh.itjust.works
    137·
    9 months ago

    “Engineers have been circulating an old, famous-among-programmers web comic about how all modern digital infrastructure rests on a project maintained by some random guy in Nebraska. (In their telling, Mr. Freund is the random guy from Nebraska.)”

    That’s not quite right. Lasse Collin is the random guy in Nebraska. Freund is the guy that noticed the whole thing was about to topple.

  • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
    50·
    9 months ago

    I suspect this was just a lucky catch of shit that happens all the time. Supply chain attacks are super scary and effectively impossible to eliminate in modern software development.

      • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
        31·
        9 months ago

        It’s almost impossible to spot by people looking directly at the code. I’m honestly surprised this one was discovered at all. People are still trying to deconstruct this exploit to figure out how the RCE worked.

        And supply chain attacks are effectively impossible to eliminate as an attack vector by a developer-user of a N-level dependency. Not having dependencies or auditing every dependency is unreasonable in most cases.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
          11·
          9 months ago

          There are sysadmins that discover a major vulnerabilities though troubleshooting

          The key is the number of people involved

        • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          9 months ago

          Right now the greatest level of supply chain secuirty that I know of is formal verification, source reproducible builds, and full source bootstrapping build systems. There was a neat FPGA bootstrapping proj3ct (the whole toolchain to program the fpga could be built on the FPGA) at last years FOSDEMs conference, and I have to admit the idea of a physically verifiable root of trust is super exciting to me, but also out of reach for 98% of projects (though more possible by the day).

    • rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social
      97·
      9 months ago

      “Linux saved itself.”

      • having FOSS code
      • being able to silence all system services to detect that bump
      • being able to run stuff in different ways, without a core system component (with and without systemd, as that backdoor only used data when sshd was started via systemd)
      • having people be perfectionist about performance measurements
      • having devs test upstream code not shipped to normal distros
      • being so good microsoft pays people to work on software for it
          • a Kendrick fan@lemmy.ml
            16·
            9 months ago

            Also, the man has said repeatedly on hackernews that he’s a postgresql developer working at microsoft. I imagine that distinction is important.

            • EdgelDil@lemmy.world
              23·
              9 months ago

              And if he was a postgresql dev working on linux but employed by the cheesecake factory it would mean that the cheesecake factory saved linux? or was that rather due to that clever dev, and helped by the platform he worked on?

              • mcc@sh.itjust.works
                4·
                9 months ago

                but if cheesecake factory hired him and supported him to make this discovery, you would look at the menu differently.

              • bruhduh@lemmy.world
                2·
                9 months ago

                No matter how much you wouldn’t like it, there’s fallacy in your statement, either that single individual singlehandedly saved everyone without community and such, or Linux was saved by everyone, Microsoft included, i mean, going to such lengths in mental gymnastics just to exclude some corporation, albeit evil one, is funny i must say, in my opinion it’s either single individual, or everyone included, no need to specifically exclude someone just because they evil or something, and yes, if cheesecake factory hired someone, they shouldn’t be excluded too

  • psmgx@lemmy.world
    36·
    9 months ago

    You’re late to the party NYT.

    Also, dude made a good save. Only arch users got hit lol

    • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      30·
      9 months ago

      1. The hack mainly targeted Debian and fedora

      2. Arch doesn’t directly link openssh to liblzma, so the hack doesn’t affect arch users.

      • Revan343@lemmy.ca
        7·
        9 months ago

        The hack mainly targeted Debian and fedora

        But on Debian it only shipped on sid. This is the reason for Debians slow as fuck release cycle

    • qaz@lemmy.world
      26·
      9 months ago

      Arch didn’t patch it with systemd so it didn’t really affect them afaik. It did hit OpenSUSE Tumbleweed users.

    • Disonantezko@lemmy.sdf.org
      25·
      9 months ago

      Do you know the exploit was detected in Debian Sid? (by a PostgreSQL developer), Arch got the update (with both compromised versions), but because don’t directly link openssh to liblzma (as Debian), and thus this attack vector is not possible.

      Also, other rolling distros also got the compromised versions, maybe: openSUSE Tumbleweed, Endeavour OS, Fedora Rawhide, Slackware -current, etc.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 months ago

      There was some checking in the exploit to verify that it was being built for a deb or rpm package, it didn’t build for anything else. Also, the way the exploit was loaded at runtime relied on features of systemd that Arch isn’t using. It was a dud on Arch.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        And how many people actually use those? Arch got hit the hardest

        Ok that’s a bad joke. The exploit targeted Debian, Ubuntu and RHEL

  • m4@kbin.social
    8·
    9 months ago

    It felt like it had a bit of sensationalism, which alas is not uncommon in today’s journalism, but can it be too much that a major newspaper like the NYT covering this story can bring indirect attention to the problem of hugely underpaid/no paid people working on (and mantaining) critical FOSS stuff?

    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
      5·
      9 months ago

      They did claim his work is “boring to tears” right after saying it was “thankless”. What a condescending piece of shit journalist.