Ubuntu Servers Hacked

An anonymous reader noted that "Ubuntu had to shutdown 5 of 8 production servers that are sponsored by Canonical, when they started attacking other systems. Canonical blames the community, saying they were community hosted, and were poorly maintained. However, kernel upgrades couldn't be done because of poor backwards compatibility with the very hardware that Canonical had sponsored! While people point fingers at each other it is pretty clear that both sides are equally to blame, the community administrators for practicing bad security practices, such as using unencrypted FTP transfers with accounts, not properly maintaining the system. However Canonical should have been well aware of what they are hosting. The question remains, if any of the files distributed to users have been compromised. A major blow for Canonical though who are attempting to enter the business market with Ubuntu Server."

Comments

Not like Debian

[Bruce Perens]

This happpened to Debian once. I remember the very careful quality of the notifications, and the forensic analysis, and the fact that it was caught quickly and there thus wasn't much damage. It showed that a volunteer community can be right on top of this sort of problem with as much or more professionality than any paid staff. It's unfortunate that the configuration of Ubuntu and its loco teams has them pointing fingers at each other. And what about those systems that can't be upgraded? Are they, per chance, using proprietary network drivers? If so, well, folks should know better.

Bruce

Some clarification

[joe_cot]

As one of the people affected by this issue, I'd like to give some clarification on this. Firstly, the servers affected were Local Community (LoCo) Team servers, of which I maintain ubuntu-us.org While I'm personally annoyed that the site is down (given it was on the front page of Digg last week), these servers are far from "production" servers; they host LoCo team resources and websites. I'd like to know what "compromised" software would have been downloaded by users, given that these servers did not host user repositories, and for the most part hosted news pages, blogs, and localized documentation. The issues were twofold: the servers were not upgraded past breezy, leaving them open to vulnerabilities after Breezy's EOL; LoCo team users were running an array of web applications (Drupal, Wordpress, Mediawiki, etc), but not updating their systems with new security patches. Top that with ftp logins and no ssh keys, and you have yourself a problem. Canonical is moving the installs to their facilities, retrieving the data, and building the installs (including the aformentioned web applications) from scratch, assuming that everything has been compromised. Hopefully in the next few days this will all be over.