Open Source Technical Information: Security Breach on Kernel.org

Sunday 25 December 2011

Security Breach on Kernel.org

,

Linus Torvalds on Google+ said

kernel.org has been down, so people aren’t sending me nearly as many pull requests las they normally do (I could hope it’s because we’re late in the -rc cycle and everybody is being very good, but then my medication wears off and reality strikes again).
So I’m avoiding boredom by writing my own dive log software, because I’m tired of not being able to see my dives and add location information later on. The Java ones just aren’t doing anything for me.
"""
Check his post – Click Here.

Message From Kernel.org

Earlier this month, a number of servers in the kernel.org infrastructure were compromised. We discovered this August 28th. While we currently believe that the source code repositories were unaffected, we are in the process of verifying this and taking steps to enhance security across the kernel.org infrastructure.
What happened?
  • Intruders gained root access on the server Hera. We believe they may have gained this access via a compromised user credential; how they managed to exploit that to root access is currently unknown and is being investigated.
  • Files belonging to ssh (openssh, openssh-server and openssh-clients) were modified and running live.
  • A trojan startup file was added to the system start up scripts
  • User interactions were logged, as well as some exploit code. We have retained this for now.
  • Trojan initially discovered due to the Xnest /dev/mem error message w/o Xnest installed; have been seen on other systems. It is unclear if systems that exhibit this message are susceptible, compromised or not. If developers see this, and you don’t have Xnest installed, please investigate.
  • It *appears* that 3.1-rc2 might have blocked the exploit injector, we don’t know if this is intentional or a side affect of another bugfix or change.
What Has Been Done so far:
  • We have currently taken boxes off line to do a backup and are in the process of doing complete reinstalls.
  • We have notified authorities in the United States and in Europe to assist with the investigation
  • We will be doing a full reinstall on all boxes on kernel.org
  • We are in the process of doing an analysis on the code within git, and the tarballs to confirm that nothing has been modified
The Linux community and kernel.org take the security of the kernel.org domain extremely seriously, and are pursuing all avenues to investigate this attack and prevent future ones.
"""
To know more check Kernel.org.

0 comments to “Security Breach on Kernel.org”

Post a Comment

Write your tips here...

Deal of the Day

Advertisement here

Advertisement here