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Thursday, 11 April 2024 10:40

Backdoored open-source package back on GitHub after being sanitised Featured

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Backdoored open-source package back on GitHub after being sanitised Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The repository of the open-source compression utility xz Utils, in which a backdoor was found prior to the Easter weekend, has now been restored to GitHub.

The account of the original maintainer, Lasse Collin, has also been restored according to a post on Reddit.

The presence of the backdoor was caught by Microsoft software engineer Andres Freund, a PostGreSQL developer, who noticed that logins with SSH were taking up a lot of CPU cycle and also generating valgrind errors.

That Freund noticed it before the long Easter weekend was lucky.
Collin has said he would be writing an account of the incident sometime in the future.

The malicious code was introduced in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1. The suspicion that it may be a state-sponsored act arose because the code had been spirited in over a long period.

The person who held the account that was responsible for the malicious code, under the name Jia Tan, appears to have now disappeared.

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Sam Varghese

Sam Varghese has been writing for iTWire since 2006, a year after the site came into existence. For nearly a decade thereafter, he wrote mostly about free and open source software, based on his own use of this genre of software. Since May 2016, he has been writing across many areas of technology. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years in India (Indian Express and Deccan Herald), the UAE (Khaleej Times) and Australia (Daily Commercial News (now defunct) and The Age). His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.

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