Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Found it early?..

I found the backdoor on five of my Vultr servers as well as my MacBook Pro this evening. I certainly didn’t catch it early.

So if that’s the state of it, it could very well be too late for many many companies. Not to mention folks who rely on TOR for their safety - there could be entire chains of backdoored entry, middle and exit nodes exposing vast numbers of TOR users over the past month or so (spies included!).




It was only in rolling release/testing/unstable distributions, a pretty small subset of systems in the grand scheme of things, is why I said that. It was introduced in February 23 release of xz. This could've been years until discovered.

Never use unstable/testing on real servers, that's a bad idea for entirely different reasons.


Which Distro did you use on the affected devices?


Very few if close to zilch companies are using rolling distros in their critical infra.


...maybe list the distros or macOS point releases/paths that you found it on macOS. ;P


Homebrew had updated to the backdoored version, so although it doesn’t appear to trigger on Mac OS, you should update things to ‘upgrade’ From 5.6.1 to 5.4.6.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: