Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. (credit: Getty Images)
Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian.
The compression utility, known as xz Utils, introduced the malicious code in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, according to Andres Freund, the developer who discovered it. There are no known reports of those versions being incorporated into any production releases for major Linux distributions, but both Red Hat and Debian reported that recently published beta releases used at least one of the backdoored versions—specifically, in Fedora 40 and Fedora Rawhide and Debian testing, unstable and experimental distributions. A stable release of Arch Linux is also affected. That distribution, however, isn’t used in production systems.
Because the backdoor was discovered before the malicious versions of xz Utils