Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world175
Comments49https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
"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.
and that one guy (Lasse) was burnt out and pressured [by jia?] to step back and let jia be the person that the whole internet infrastructure relied upon
Publicly pressured by sock puppets. You can see some rando doing similar in repositories for projects like Avahi.
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.
Obviously not impossible, just the best reason for open source software
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.
True, but we do know how it got into xz in the first place. Human error and bad practice, we wouldn't have to reverse engineer the exploit if xz didn't allow binary commits all together. It's a very convoluted exploit with hiding "junk" and using awk and other commands to cut around that junk and combining it creating a payload and executing it. Our reliance on binary blobs is a double edged sword.
Also true, because human error is impossible to snuff out completely, however it can be reduced if companies donated to the projects they use. For example, Microsoft depends on XZ and doesn't donate them anything. It's free as in freedom not cost. Foss devs aren't suppliers, it comes as is. If you want improvements in the software your massive company relies on, then donate, otherwise don't expect anything, they aren't your slaves.
You can't test a archive program without binaries
Generate the binaries during test execution from known (version controlled) inputs, plaintext files and things. Don't check binaries into source control, especially not intentionally corrupt ones that other maintainers and observers don't know what they may contain.
Exactly this. Couldn't have said it better myself.
laughs in Gentoo
There are sysadmins that discover a major vulnerabilities though troubleshooting
The key is the number of people involved
So obscure projects are fucked.
No one cares about obscure projects from an attack perspective. What you should be worried about is the dependency chain.
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).
So, Microsoft saved everyone from the bad Linux then?
/s
"Linux saved itself."
Yeah no Microsoft saved it
A nerd who was benchmarking their ssh connection saved it...I love everything about that fello
Also, the man has said repeatedly on hackernews that he's a postgresql developer working at microsoft. I imagine that distinction is important.
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?
but if cheesecake factory hired him and supported him to make this discovery, you would look at the menu differently.
WTF is this whole thread?
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
They wanted to get a benchmark environment as silent as possible, connected over ssh and it didnt get silent
A specialist
You're late to the party NYT.
Also, dude made a good save. Only arch users got hit lol
The hack mainly targeted Debian and fedora
Arch doesn't directly link openssh to liblzma, so the hack doesn't affect arch users.
But on Debian it only shipped on sid. This is the reason for Debians slow as fuck release cycle
Do you know the exploit was detected in Debian Sid? (by a
PostgreSQLdeveloper), Arch got the update (with both compromised versions), but because don't directly linkopensshtoliblzma(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.
Arch didn't patch it with systemd so it didn't really affect them afaik. It did hit OpenSUSE Tumbleweed users.
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.
Fedora 40 testing branch and rawhide got it as well, as well tumbleweed and debian sid
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
I was on Fedora Kinoite 40 testing compose when it hit... so me
You were not the target. The idea probably was to get it pushed into downstream over a longer period
I understand that the Linux ecosystem in general was ultimately the target, yes.
I was answering "how many people use those?"
nothing of value was lost
https://web.archive.org/web/20240405080123/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html
Thanks but Firefox already has a reading mode
Well, I had to solve three CAPTCHA puzzles before getting through to the page itself, so I figured to insert that link.
Maybe they don't like you
A picture of the man
Yuuuuuuup. We all owe this man beer for life.
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?
They did claim his work is “boring to tears” right after saying it was “thankless”. What a condescending piece of shit journalist.
Yes
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/us-avoids-digital-security-crisis-developer-uncovers-sabotage-software