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This backdoor almost infected Linux everywhere: The XZ Utils close call

For the first time, an open-source maintainer put malware into a key Linux utility. We're still not sure who or why - but here's what you can do about it.

BeeBright/Getty ImagesIt all started when Andres Freund, a Microsoft principal software engineer, became curious about why the SSH remote security code in the Debian Linux beta was running slowly. Freund did some digging and discovered the problem: A chief programmer and maintainer of the xz data compression library, Jia Tan, had put a backdoor in the code. But, as Eric S. Raymond, open-source co-founder, observed, "It sounds prudent and cautious to suppose that for any discovered exploit, there must be a large number of undiscovered ones.

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