For me I feel like we have not had any big security stuff since the whole log4j thing. While this seems bigger they have caught it relatively early. I feel like more people had to panic patch Minecraft servers with log4j.
My only reservation is that this compromised contributor has been working on the project for a few years. I hope that this is the end of the tunnel and there aren’t more issues to be uncovered with further analysis.
The only people who will have this vulnerability AFAIK (and have it be actionable with the ssh backdoor) are folks running Debian unstable on a ssh server. The shitty part about this is a rupture in trust for the maintainers at xz.
Honestly, the attacker picked a really shitty time frame considering their payload isn't in any important point releases where they could have the most effect.
So I assume the malicious code is being removed and a version 5.6.2 without it will be released soon? Or is it more complex to solve and I’m being naive?
So the backdoor was not in the source code but in the system used to build the code. Devs for a long time now have swapped over to an automated build system and what happened with this one is in the last step for the xz build process it adds the backdoor to it. You simply have to remove the references to the data in the build config.
I'm no expert, but I'd assume the repository maintainers would pull the malicious packages ASAP. check to see if you have any updates available, if the malicious version is not available then you're chilling
People aren't 100% sure yet but preliminary analysis believes it is contained. Look forward to excrutiatingly-detailed levels of analysis to be published in the coming days and weeks, this is like every Foss Discourse topic tossed into a blender all at once.