ID: IRCNE2011091239
Date: 2011-09-04
According to "computerworld", Hackers have broken 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.
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.
They think that the hackers may have stolen a user's login credentials to break into the system.
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.
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.
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