Hackers break into Linux Foundation and Linux.com, both taken offline

It's barely two week kernel.org Linux archieve site suffered an attack, the Linux Foundation has removed its websites from the web completely to clean up from a "security breach."

A notice posted on the Linux Foundation said the entire infrastructure including LinuxFoundation.org, Linux.com, and their subdomains are down for maintenance due to a security breach that was discovered on September 8, 2011.

The group said, they have made this decision in the interest of extreme caution and security best pratices and believed this breach was connected to the intrusion on kernel.org.

More from the Linux Foundation announcement:

We are in the process of restoring services in a secure manner as quickly as possible. As with any intrusion and as a matter of caution, you should consider the passwords and SSH keys that you have used on these sites compromised. If you have reused these passwords on other sites, please change them immediately. We are currently auditing all systems and will update this statement when we have more information.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We are taking this matter seriously and appreciate your patience. The Linux Foundation infrastructure houses a variety of services and programs including Linux.com, Open Printing, Linux Mark, Linux Foundation events and others, but does not include the Linux kernel or its code repositories.

Although the Kernel.org site is still offline after that compromise which was discovered on August 28th, most of the services offered by the Linux Foundation will be restored immediately the breach has been neutralized and new security measures put in place.

Author: dfgdfg,

Categories: Linux, Linux Foundation, Linux hacked, Tech News

Hackers gain unauthorized access into Linux source code site

As Linux fans know, there are two kinds of hackers: the good guys who develop free software, such as the Linux kernel, and the bad guys who break into computers.

The bad guys paid the good guys an unwelcome visit earlier this month, breaking into the Kernel.org website that is home to the Linux project. They gained root access to a server known as Hera and ultimately compromised "a number of servers in the kernel.org infrastructure," according to a note on the kernel.org website Wednesday.

Administrators of the website learned of the problem Sunday and soon discovered a number of bad things were happening on their servers. Files were modified, a malicious program was added to the server's startup scripts and some user data was logged.

Kernel.org's owners have contacted law enforcement in the U.S. and Europe and are in the process of reinstalling the site's infrastructure and figuring out what happened.

They think that the hackers may have stolen a user's login credentials to break into the system, and the site is making each of its 448 users change their passwords and SSH (Secure Shell) keys.

The hack is worrying because Kernel.org is the place where Linux distributors download the source code for the widely used operating system's kernel. But Kernel.org's note says that, even with root access, it would be difficult for a hacker to slip malicious source code into the Linux kernel without it being noticed. That's because Linux's change-tracking system takes a cryptographic hash of each file at the time it is published.

So once a component of the Linux kernel has been written and published to Kernel.org, "it is not possible to change the old versions without it being noticed," the Kernel.org note said.

This kind of compromise has become disturbingly common. In January, servers used by the Fedora project -- the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- were hacked. And around the same time another open-source software development site called SourceForge was also broken into.

Author: dfgdfg,

Categories: Linux, Linux hacked, Tech News