Slashdot Mirror


Novell OpenSUSE Server Hacked

abelikoff writes "Both LinuxWorld Australia and SuSE Linux Forums report that OpenSUSE website got hacked last night." This story was submitted quite a number of times.

14 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. *sigh* by the-amazing-blob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I still will never understand why people do stupid things like hack websites.

    1. Re:*sigh* by jupiter909 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hacking websites is not stupid. It's proof of concept. It is often good when people hack/crack things, it forces for tighter control and security. If not for people hacking and cracking things we would not have things such as online shopping and ssh encrpytion etc. It is all part of a never ended life cycle. More often than not it is poor management/admin than the software/systems themselves. Human error.

  2. ouch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny


    They could just run OpenBSD.

  3. Re:Don't blame LINUX by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Linux is near-flawless in terms of security.

    You don't follow security mailing lists, do you? Most Linux distros have decent security but "near-flawless"?

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  4. Details of the hack? by Trigulus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Was this a targeted attack? Did they just fall victim to a script? Unpatched vulnerability? Weak password? what? Im just asking cause none of the links provided answer this.

    --
    If something exists that does not need a creator (god) then why must the cosmos need one?
  5. Re:Rights or not by meadandale · · Score: 5, Funny
    "All your uranium are belong to us!"

    Step away from the fissionable material...It is obviously causing you brain damage.

  6. Re:Don't blame LINUX by dasunt · · Score: 5, Funny
    People always try to blame the software right away but usually it's poor administration.

    Isn't this the same flaw Windows has?

  7. OpenSUSE website Hacked? No. by blanks · · Score: 5, Informative

    The open SuSE website wasnt hacked, it was a damn gamming machine they had on their network.

    From TFA:

    "The employees that set it up apparently had no idea of security," Brandon said. "But what is really surprising is that Novell would allow employees to set up game servers on their corporate network and then allow the public to access it."

    "There was no major breach of security here," Barney said. "Needless to say, we are taking the appropriate steps" to address the situation.

  8. Hey, by Create+an+Account · · Score: 5, Funny

    Your logic and reason are not welcome here.

  9. Re:Linux Secure By Design? by scronline · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Speaking from personal experience, 85% of all hacks come from poor administration. ie. not patching flaws, weak passwords, poor security measure such as file permissions and lack of firewalls. The remaining 15% come from a mixture of things, and like it or not, 14.999% of that is Windows. Security through obscurity doesn't work when you have thousands of people pounding at your code just trying to find a way in.

    All these Worms on the net is a perfect example. And when you get down to it, even some of the poor administration is Microsoft's fault for making it "so easy you don't need an experienced technician...." When in fact they bury stuff so deep unless you know where it is, the necessary changes don't get made leaving everything as default.

    I can't even begin to count how many times I've gone to a customer's location where they had an employee that was a self proclaimed geek that did all the setup and everything was not only wrong, it opened gaping holes on their network. Including things like having a USER logging in as Administrator on the server and using it as a workstation.

    Plus I won't go into all the people who hold an MCSE that never touched a computer until they went to a 2 week bootcamp on how to pass the tests.

    But, point in fact, any closed source application is subject to flaws that don't get patched because it's a small enough flaw that putting a programmer on it to fix it would cost more than keeping the flaw hidden.

  10. Re:Rights or not by klykken · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You might have confused the Arabic language with the Persian language (Farsi). They share the same alphabet but are entirely different.

    --
    Looks like a fish, drives like a fish, steers like a cow.
  11. That IS the breach of security. by khasim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Allowing "users" to setup their own box, on your network, outside your firewall, using your IP address IS a breach of security.

  12. Re:As you can see by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a little worse than that. The IHS guys aren't just script kiddies, their lead guy's blog is here. He is apparently very active in writing exploits and gives code to all of them. He was just accepted into a university, but worse, one of his blog entries is about how he likes slackware and is trying to write some code to help the project out. Now I don't know about you, but I find that suspicious as hell. Unless someone goes over every line of code submitted with a magnifying glass than it can be fairly easy to sneak in a little area for a buffer overflow or something. (Preventive measures like SELinux and exec-shield are necessary and even they don't fully solve the problem). I can only hope that the slackware community does decent background checks on submitters, and also good code checking. The last thing we need is for Open Source to start being purposely made vulnerable and attacked from within.
    Regards,
    Steve

  13. Re:ssh scan by despisethesun · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have a hard time to see the gain in security by disalowing root but allowing users to login and then sudo.

    You must not have much experience with sudo. One of the benefits of it is that it allows you to give root permission to people for specific tasks that they would need that access level for. While there are certainly a lot of people who set their sudoers file to "allow all" for everyone, if sudo is properly implemented no one should be able to do anything they don't NEED to do as root. Sudo also has the benefit of keeping track of what users used it to do what tasks, making it easier to trace the path an attack came from.

    Gogo0 also mentioned an added benefit to this scheme so I'm not going to repeat it here.

    --
    This poo is cold.