A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 30, 2024 11:27 UTC (Sat) by jd (guest, #26381)
In reply to: A backdoor in xz by alex
Parent article: A backdoor in xz

We know it isn't the first. A group of researchers tried to submit exploit-ridden code to the Linux kernel, for example.

There are also packages that have been modified to not work in certain countries, and one Python package got effectively yeeted by the primary maintainer over politics.

And it's reasonable to assume that we only know a small percentage of cases.

Closed source is unlikely to be better. It would seem to me that quite a number of exploits that get discovered seem to be very bizarre backdoors.

If we generalise to all malicious code, then the Sony Rootkit is probably the most notorious.