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Screenshot of github showing part of the commit message of this commit with this text:
Remove the backdoor found in 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 (CVE-2024-3094).
While the backdoor was inactive (and thus harmless) without inserting
a small trigger code into the build system when the source package was
created, it's good to remove this anyway:
- The executable payloads were embedded as binary blobs in
the test files. This was a blatant violation of the
Debian Free Software Guidelines.
- On machines that see lots bots poking at the SSH port, the backdoor
noticeably increased CPU load, resulting in degraded user experience
and thus overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
- The maintainer who added the backdoor has disappeared.
- Backdoors are bad for security.
This reverts the following without making any other changes:
The sentence "This was a blatant violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines" is highlighted.
Below the github screenshot is a frame of the 1998 film The Big Lebowski with the meme caption "What, are you a fucking park ranger now?" from the scene where that line was spoken.
A really good point I heard is: this was likely a state actor attack, so how many others just like this are out there, undiscovered?
Unpopular opinion: what if it was not a state actor and just some bored person somewhere that thought it would be cool to own a bot net?
What if this is just one of many backdoors and it’s just the only one we found?
Realistically I think it's probably easier to acquire a botnet of less secure systems. This was a targeted attack.
Easier, yes. But some people will do stuff because it is more challenging.
Nobody is both that bored and that motivated. Unless paid.
You forget that a lot of brilliant open source projects are one man shows from geniuses somewhere around the world. They are usually not paid.
In the other hand, if you get your hands on a powerful botnet, you can rent out its services (like ddos for example) for quite a bit of money.
The design is Moriarty lvls of complex. State actor might be too specific, but everything but a group of people would be highly unlikely.
I heard that person actively contributed for something like 2 years, providing actually useful contributions, to gain the level of trust needed to plant that backdoor. Feels a bit too much to chalk it up to boredom.
As for the second part, that's an interesting question. Are there lots of backdoors and we just happened to notice this one, or are backdoors very rare exactly because we'd have found them out soon like in this case?
You'd be surprised what I manage with motivation and boredom.
You'd be surprised what a highly skilled ~~scalled~~ person can manage to achieve.
Boredom, Skills and Motivation are dangerous things to have if improperly handled.
You might be on to something, it might have been the lizzard people!
Yeah, well that's just, like, your opinion, man. (You mentioned the word opinion in a post referencing The Big Lebowski. I had to. Thank you for coming to my shit post.)
It’s scary to think about… a lot of people are now thinking about how we can best isolate our build test process so it works as a test suite but doesn’t have any way to interact with the output or environment.
It’s just blows my mind to think of the levels of obfuscation this process used and how easy it would be to miss it.