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The malicious changes were submitted by JiaT75, one of the two main xz Utils developers with years of contributions to the project.

“Given the activity over several weeks, the committer is either directly involved or there was some quite severe compromise of their system,” Freund wrote. “Unfortunately the latter looks like the less likely explanation, given they communicated on various lists about the ‘fixes’” provided in recent updates. Those updates and fixes can be found here, here, here, and here. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/backdoor-found-in-widely-used-linux-utility-breaks-encrypted-ssh-connections/

That really sucks. This kind of thing can make people and companies lose trust in open source. I wonder if we will learn the reason behind that. I would guess the developer was paid a lot of money by some organization to risk ruining his reputation like that.

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Like the exact same thing can not happen in a closed source codebase. It probably does daily. Since closed codebases the due dilligence and reviews cost money, and nobody can see the state. They are intentionally neglected.
Open source nor closed source is immune to the 5$ wrench hack

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Can’t decide which one is more relevant - the $5 wrench hack, or any sort of blackmailing.

XKCD 538 - Security

XKCD 416 - Zealous Autoconfig

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