alt Hacker NewsThis is IMO one of the coolest tech stories to ever happen, seriously amazing spycraft & hacking skills, but I haven't been keeping up with new developments from this story since it broke. Last I heard, the best guess at what happened was some state-sponsored actor worked very hard to get this merged, and it was caught luckily at the last minute. But no one had any smoking gun as to who did it or why or who they were targeting. Any new developments since then? Are we still just totally in the dark about what was going on here?
Replies
Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video https://youtu.be/aoag03mSuXQ?t=2883:
> A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious.
> And they also worked on Chinese New Year, but not on Christmas. And over the years, there were nine changes that fall outside of the Beijing time into UTC+2, which is a time zone that includes Israel and parts of Western Russia. That's why some experts have speculated that this could be the work of APT29, a Russian-state-backed hacker group also known as Cozy Bear. But again, do we know? No, of course we don't know who it is, and we likely will never know.
Stuxnet is also another mindblowing case. Wired write-up on it is a recommended reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20141028182107/http://www.wired....
> and it was caught luckily at the last minute
This isn't correct at all. The changes were merged into xz and made it into testing branches of major Linux distros.
It was caught at T plus a few minutes only because a neurotic Microsoft employee performing debugging noticed an obscure performance issue.
You can literally say Microsoft saved Linux that day. Imagine thinking this 25 years ago.
It's the difference between something really bad which happened, and something really, really, really, really bad: a malicious actor having RCE credentials to every new Debian and Red Hat box on planet Earth.