Technologist vs spy: the xz backdoor debate
lcamtuf.substack.com
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career. Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of

Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.

  • @mea_rah
    6•8 months ago

    its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

    Perhaps I’m misremembering things, but I’m pretty sure the SysVinit didn’t run any “more restricted processes”. It ran a bunch of bash scripts as root. Said bash scripts were often absolutely terrible.