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Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Programming
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You may want to look into how the xz backdoor has been discovered. That backdoor was very well hidden. Implementing a crypto mining malware would be blatantly obvious and yes, people do in fact look at such code
Yes, but people are forgetting how it was discovered.
It was discovered because there was a visible performance impact by running benchmark tests on other, time-critical software.
Do you know how it was not discovered? By maintainers looking through changes of the software and looking through the code, exactly the way that the commenter and you and others are saying things would be caught.
If the attacker hadn't been so eager and only set it to start working after a time delay a year later or multiple updates later? It would have infected almost every server in the world, even if it got noticed immediately, it would have been a giant problem that would have reaped the benefits for the malicious party before it could be regressed and changed.
That was scary. I had the bad version on my computer for a bit.