TL;DR: Nothing really new here. They just summarize the social engineering of the attack.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Everyone and their grandmother is writing/blogging about this attack by paraphrasing all the same information.
Need for Clicks 101
Fascinating read - interesting that the origin of the hack is not yet known (or at least, released). I wonder what the stats are on these sorts of exploits in OSS - the concept relies so much on trust and individuals.
the concept relies so much on trust and individuals.
Everything does though.
Ken Thompson talked about this back in 1984, his talk/article "Reflections on trusting trust" is a short but scary read.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
In the end, what can we trust?
Ultimately, nothing, unless you built everything yourself from scratch, just about from the silicon up.
Everything is risk management.
World's biggest backdoor
~~Puh-lease. At least Heartbleed made it into production at enormous scale.~~
I stand corrected.
A backdoor is very distinct from a vanilla vulnerability. Heartbleed was a vulnerability, meaning the devs made a mistake in the code, introducing a method of attack. XZ was backdoored, meaning a malicious actor intentionally introduced a method by which he could exploit systems.
Both are pretty serious vulnerabilities, but a backdoor, especially introduced so high in the supply chain, would have been devastating had it not been caught so early.
CVE score of heartbleed was 7.5, the score of this XZ backdoor is 10....
Heartbleed was the result of an accidental buffer overread bug, not a backdoor.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On March 29, Microsoft software developer Andres Freund was trying to optimize the performance of his computer when he noticed that one program was using an unexpected amount of processing power.
The XZ backdoor was introduced by way of what is known as a software supply chain attack, which the National Counterintelligence and Security Center defines as “deliberate acts directed against the supply chains of software products themselves.” The attacks often employ complex ways of changing the source code of the programs, such as gaining unauthorized access to a developer’s system or through a malicious insider with legitimate access.
The malicious code in XZ Utils was introduced by a user calling themself Jia Tan, employing the handle JiaT75, according to Ars Technica and Wired.
Tan’s elevation to being a co-maintainer mostly played out on an email group where code developers — in the open-source, collaborative spirit of the Linux family of operating systems — exchange ideas and strategize to build applications.
Their entire online presence is related to these brief interactions on the mailing list dedicated to XZ; their only recorded interest is in quickly ushering along updates to the software.
A leaked document from the defense contractor HBGary Federal outlines the meticulousness that may go into maintaining these fictive personas, including creating an elaborate online footprint — something which was decidedly missing from the accounts involved in the XZ timeline.
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