this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Damn, it is actually scary that they managed to pull this off. The backdoor came from the second-largest contributor to xz too, not some random drive-by.
They've been contributing to xz for two years, and commited various "test" binary files.
It's looking more like a long game to compromise an upstream.
Either that or the attacker was very good at choosing their puppet…
Well the account is focused on one particular project which makes sense if you expect to get burned at some point and don't want all your other exploits to be detected. It looks like there was a second sock puppet account involved in the original attack vector support code.
We should certainly audit other projects for similar changes from other psudoanonymous accounts.
Yeah, and the 700 commits should be reverted… just in case we missed something.
That is a should be standard procedure