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Recently, while doing some routine maintenance, Freund inadvertently found a backdoor hidden in a piece of software that is part of the Linux operating system. The backdoor was a possible prelude to aA backdoor could have been the prelude to a major cyberattack.Now, in a twist fit for Hollywood, tech leaders and cybersecurity researchers are hailing Freund as a hero. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, praised his “curiosity and craftsmanship.
The saga began earlier this year, when Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognise. He was jetlagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory. In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.
But his digging kept turning up new evidence, and last week, Freund sent his findings to a group of open-source software developers. The news set the tech world on fire. Within hours, a fix was developed and some researchers were crediting him with preventing a potentially historic cyberattack. According to some researchers who have gone back and looked at the evidence, the attacker appears to have used a pseudonym, “Jia Tan,” to suggest changes to xz Utils as far back as 2022.
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Source: FinancialReview - 🏆 2. / 90 Read more »