this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
110 points (96.6% liked)
Linux
48145 readers
839 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's way more steps than I thought
I wonder if something so complex makes it easier to potentially detect than something slightly simpler.
Btw what does the .o file do, is that the one running inside ssh through system d?
I am by far an expert, but imo it seems it needed to be complex to achieve its goals, and to get that level of change in without notice required breaking it down and sneaking pieces in over time.
Happy to be corrected of course if this is a wrong interpretation
You're correct. Right now many experts are scrambling all those small pieces together as to how this could happen in the first place, as a lot of it was public too: the social pressure on maintainers, random software changes that now seem suspicious, and the absence of a real identity of the perpetrators. Every expert who's onto this seems to be a real person, with a real identity and a real face to the name.
Prior to the first commits, there must have been months if not years of planning too.
But just the fact that some of the code those perpetrators wrote took +0.5 seconds more for something that would normally only take 0.2-0.3 seconds is what gave them away.
0.5 seconds of CPU time vs. years of planning.
It's an intriguing story.
They tried so hard, they got so far, but in the end, it didn't even matter.
I wonder exactly why ssh was taking so long more. Perhaps the bits that scan ssh logs with a regex to extract IP address and username?
Whatever it is, that particular bit should be easy to deactivate since somehow a full fledged binary file with executable code was being bundled. I can imagine it only being active under a toggle that would make it harder to detect, such as a specific time of day.
That's my take as well