Red Hat, Fedora Servers Compromised
An anonymous reader writes "In an email sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it has been revealed that both Fedora and Red Hat servers have been compromised. As a result Fedora is changing their package signing key. Red Hat has released a security advisory and a script to detect potentially compromised openssh packages."
These are the guys, to the annoyance of nearly everyone, who turned on SELinux on Fedora Core by default.
These are the guys who noticed they annoyed everyone, and turned on targeted-mode by default.
Coming from someone with many systems, completely exposed to the Internet, with thousand day uptimes, these RedHat folk are in fact sufficiently paranoid.
They have taken all the reasonable precautions, and if their passphrase was strong, then the danger of my servers being compromised by meteor strike is a much greater worry.
They should have ran a secure OS like vista.
Given enough time and energy, even Linux servers can be hacked.
With the growing interest in Linux, I wonder if we'll see more parity of viruses between Windows and Linux.
Is this bug in OpenSSH related to the one that was found in Debian-related distros back about April? Maybe I'm reading the article summary incorrectly.
source code filching! nothing else.
Last week? Does that mean earlier this week, or the week before the week I'm in? At what point in whatever week was last week? If I did an install/update after a certain date am I covered?
It would be nice if they weren't so vague about the time frame. Maybe it is to encourage people to check and not assume they will not have problems, but in a situation like this, the more accurate a picture I have of what is going on, the better I feel.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I can confirm that roughly 30 kernel 0dayz circulate in the underground. Working for all kernelz 2.6.X up to 2.6.27-rc3 :)
happy birthday.
"Just run this shell script to verify you're not infected"
No way I'm falling for that one.
Back to work.
I could not RTFA (/.ed), but is there any indication of how this "compromise" occurred?
My hats off, though, to the Red Hat folks. Full disclosure and immediate positive action speaks volumes.
On a related note, you should not use Fedora in a production environment anyway. That's what RHEL is for. Fedora = Testing. RHEL = Stable. At least in theory.
Pretty sure most of us are above this anyway, but let's avoid a distro flamewar. You can look through my past comments and see that RH is far from my preferred distro, and I love to take shots at them. But now is not the time. Anyone can get hacked, and it sucks. And they're being responsible about reporting and mitigating.
Godspeed, gentlemen.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I really only care to know HOW the attacker got in.
Basically, if he used unknown 0-day and RH/Fedora have no idea what he exploited, then they should say so, so people can watch out.
If he stole username/password from someone dumb - say so.
If he walked into the hosting center, say so.
I REALLY want to how know he compromised their server(s).
I might be next v0v
the most likely attack was probably from those lame SSH dictionary scans on port 22. This is usually just an extreme annoyance to admins who must provide port 22 service and haven't heard of 'SSHguard'.
Or just use SSH key authentication, this is what it's for. Anyone clever enough to use SSH on a redhat project server should be able to manage key authentication.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Like change system files? Nope. ... So... it can mess up my documents? Darn.
Oh, good. My life's work is reconstructable in a mere few decades; wheras if it damages system files, a reinstall could take up to half an hour!
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Our RHEL5/x86_64 system has been affected by this problem: I have ran the script from Red Hat openssh blacklist page, and found that all four openssh packages (openssh, openssh-clients, openssh-askpass, openssh-server) had their checksum on the blacklist. I took the server down, created a backup snapshot of the root disk, and I am currently reinstalling it, while checking other volumes and the root volume snapshot for any signs of intrusion.
The most annoying thing is that Red Hat remains silent on the main problem: what the compromised packages contained, how to determine whether the possible attacker exploited the access offered by those packages or not, when exactly were the packages signed, what other precautions to do on other servers (notify users which use the same password as on a compromised server, check for other modified binaries, etc.). I have verified that I had a trojanized binaries on my system, but apart from that, it is not clear what else the possible attacker managed to do.
Red Hat says the packages were not distributed over RHN, so I wonder how I got them. I had another repository in my yum.conf: rpmforge. Maybe this was the source of the malware. My syslog (even a copy on a syslog server) did not say anything about upgrading openssh in the last month or so. However, on Aug 15 it upgraded the YUM RHN plugin. On the same day our dovecot stopped responding, saying the time went backwards (and yes, there was time move several weeks back and then forward, according to dovecot log). Also the rpm -qi said the package was built on Aug 13 13:13:03, and signed five minutes later. However, the install time reported by rpm on my system was July 25 (which would corelate with the time slip reported by dovecot).
Did anybody else met the trojanized openssh mentioned in the advisory? Please share your findings.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons, sorry.