Last weekend, the IT world was shocked by a new security vulnerability that, if not discovered earlier, would have killed various Linux operating systems.
The vulnerability was announced by Red Hat, which said that the XZ Utils data compression software, specifically the latest update of the software, was found to be able to hack certain operating systems such as Fedora Rawhide and Debian in beta versions.
XZ Utils, otherwise known as LZMA Utils has previously been updated with a vulnerability deliberately inserted by the developer of the software, where it gives hackers unlimited access to any computer that has this software installed through an SSH connection.
XZ Utils was developed by the Tukaani Project on GitHub, and according to the website's update log, some of the latest updates that appeared to introduce the vulnerability appear to have been made by an individual named Jia Tan (JiaT75). The GitHub page has now been shut down to ensure people don't download the software.
This vulnerability was discovered by a Microsoft researcher named Andres Freund who happened to be doing benchmark tests related to logging in using SSH at the time. The operating system he was using came with the latest XZ Utils update and noticed that the login time to his account was a bit slower and also a higher CPU process usage for the liblzma task (the name of the process behind XZ Utils).
It is a good thing that this attack vector was discovered early, because for now, it is seen that this vulnerability only affects Linux operating systems that are in the experimental phase for the time being.