Why a near-miss cyberattack put US officials and the tech industry on edge

mullet

mullet

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Why a near-miss cyberattack put US officials and the tech industry on edge​


WASHINGTON, April 5 (Reuters) - German software developer Andres Freund was running some detailed performance tests last month when he noticed odd behavior in a little known program. What he found when he investigated has sent shudders across the software world and drawn attention from tech executives and government officials.

Freund, who works for Microsoft out of San Francisco, discovered that the latest version of the open source software program XZ Utils had been deliberately sabotaged by one of its developers, a move that could have carved out a secret door to millions of servers across the internet.
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The near-miss has refocused attention on the safety of open source software – free, often volunteer-maintained programs whose transparency and flexibility mean they serve as the foundation for the internet economy.

Many such projects depend on a tiny circle of unpaid volunteers fighting to get out from under a pile of demands for fixes and upgrades.

XZ, a suite of file compression tools packaged into distributions of the Linux operating system, was long maintained by a single author, Lasse Collin.

In recent years, he appeared to be under strain.
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philb2 said:
So someone should hire Lasse Collin (and others like him). There are large companies, you know who they are, who could easily afford his salary.

I wonder how many other mission-critical open source modules are in this situation.
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The answer is too many, and they get funded all the time, just not until after some big company has a near miss or a big problem and suddenly there is financial incentive to do so.
 
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