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Gnome.org Compromised?
Garden GNOME writes "The GNOME sysadmin team has just announced that the main GNOME web server has probably been intruded into, leading to the shutdown of the GNOME website, (including bugzilla.gnome.org, art.gnome.org and developer.gnome.org). The GNOME mailing lists, and CVS servers seem to be up, though the FTP server was immediately taken down as a precautionary measure (released sources are believed to be intact). This is bad, because GNOME 2.6 was supposed to be released tomorrow. Let's hope it is a false alarm."
I guess the next version of longhorn will now look like GNOME.
Damn you KDE zealots!! Let us have our release!
Shouldn't that read Gnome.org Kompromised? No, no, that's KDE. It should read Gnome.org Gnompromised.
The Slashbots will point blame at the admins. However, if it were Microsoft...
Am I the only one who started picturing little lawn ornament men being caught in embarrassing positions?
Shades of Toy story....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Well...I suppose that if this is a new vulnerability, it's better that they go after a high-profile webserver with a good admin team that can catch the attack than that they attack many poorly-adminned ones.
May we never see th
We've discovered evidence of an intrusion on the server
hosting www.gnome.org and other gnome.org websites.
At the present time, we think that the released gnome
sources and the gnome source code repository are unaffected.
We are investigating further and will provide updates
as we know more. We hope to have the essential services
hosted on the affected machine up and running again as soon
as possible.
The GNOME sysadmin team
23 March 2003
At least they caught it now, instead of after the release. Now the code can be checked before it goes out, instead of everyone worrying about whether they downloaded compromised code
A Compromised Gnome. The image is just wrong.
But, just like in previous break-ins to other systems (Gentoo, Debian, Savannah), they're taking the correct actions by shutting everything down and BEING CAREFUL. I often wonder if commercial companies are always this fastidious.
:)
You can't beat all the crackers, but handling a bad situation correctly should be commended. Good job, GNOME team!
I'm eagerly awaiting 2.6, too, I may add!
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Oh my God! I hope they didn't steal any source code!!
That's the wrong attitude to take. If a Linux-based server is compromised because of software flaws, that's a perfectly legitimate point in an argument about security, just as the compromise of a Windows-based server because of a software flaw would be. If there's a real vulnerability that let somebody crack the system (as opposed to a misconfiguration or incorrect belief that the system was broken into) it needs to be fixed pronto, rather than written off as a PR event.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
You know...honestly...
There have been serveral major, high profile compromises of numerous FOSS servers in the past twelve months. Including a compromise of the GNU source repository.
Microsoft has not made a big deal out of these (at least as far as I've seen). Whereas every security flaw at Microsoft is treated by Slashdot as if someone got access to the crown jewels (well, admittedly the Windows source is running around all over the place...)
Microsoft has really been acting a lot nicer towards FOSS folks about security lapses.
That being said, I'm just *waiting* for a sourceforge compromise. That would be a *huge* hit, and it just plain has to happen sooner or later.
It would be nice if a couple of distributions put out basic *up-to-date* HOWTOs of best practices on how to set up minimal, secure servers using their distribution.
May we never see th
You can't compare a Linux distribution with hundreds of packages to Windows, which is basically a kernel/GUI/browser combo.
Try using (for Linux) the number of kernel/X11/Mozilla vulnerabilities instead and at least you'll start making sense.
must.. resist.. temptation to moderate...
I wonder if they are running a Debian based or Debian itself, and Debian has another hole in it.
Funny. Too bad that was just a regular kernel hole, not one special to Debian's kernel. Any other distros can simply count themselves lucky the attackers didn't choose them.
When Microsoft undergoes a security breech, their source code spills out and leaks across the entire Internet.
When gnome.org undergoes a security breech, their source code is more *difficult* to get.
Fun, eh?
May we never see th
I fully expect a bunch of lame Microsoft jokes.
But let's be real, here. Last year in the span of six months, Debian, Gentoo, and GNU (twice!) were compromised. Now GNOME.
Can you honestly rail on Microsoft? When was the last time their servers were compromised? I only vaguely recall something in 2000 about alleged stolen source code, and a real good that has turned out all these years later. As for this year's stolen source code, Slashdot never reported this but it was taken from a Linux computer at MainSoft.
Just funny how things are viewed around here, with a certain bias some people don't even realize they have.
My bad, won't happen again.
-KDE
Error 407 - No creative sig found
From Netcraft:
Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.6.4 OpenSSL/0.9.5a PHP/3.0.7
Could it have anything to do with the old version of OpenSSL, and the numerous vulns found lately?
...sorry.
More info will appear as the forensics are done.
But to emphasize: cvs.gnome.org is a seperate system
With OSS, an intrusion, even a full bore compromise of the code base is more likely to be caught. I would hope that there are diligent OSS people that cross-compare their copies of the source to the CVS copies and look for disrepancies. A distributed analysis of all changes (including the officially sanctioned ones) would help uncover malicious code.
In contrast, the users of proprietary code have only the manufacturer's word on what changes occured, who made them, and what those changes do. We users have no easy way (short of reverse engineering the code deltas on the binaries) of determining what happened between version X and version X.1. The security of non-OSS code is in nontransparent hands and that makes it insecure.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The script used to upload files to the master FTP site also mailed MD5 sums to a mailing list hosted on another machine. That script doesn't appear to have been altered (to insert a backdoor, the script would need to repack the tarballs with an exploit on the fly), so the MD5 sums from that mailing list should be reliable.
Here is what the devolopers should do.
Each time they submit a file that they have made changes to in the cvs archive, then also hmac it and sign it with their private key. Then later on if the system was compromized you could go back and computer the hmac of the file to make sure it matches that which the programmer submitted it to be.
And then even if the system was compromised you wouldn't have to question which ones were changed or not since it can be checked just by confirming the hmacs.
The best design for security have perfect forward security. And a signed hmac would prove the validity of the file unless the signing key was compromised.
So, when is the FBI going to accounce their special task force to track down these dangerous hackers? After all, isn't that what they did when the Microsoft code was leaked? Something tells me this won't even make the FBI's radar, though...
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
We have to remember that most of the people working on Gnome and/or maintaining the servers are volunteers. That said, I have to tip my hat to these people for the very professional action they provided post the compromise. Taking down the compromised server, informing the community, and, most importantly, not releasing premature statements of blame or excuses (which is more than what I can say for a lot of professional companies).