This time, we got lucky. It mostly affected bleeding-edge distros. But that's not a defense strategy
The discovery last week of a backdoor in a widely used open source compression library called xz could have been a security disaster had it not been caught by luck and atypical curiosity about latency from a Microsoft engineer.
What appears to happen, simply put, is that on a machine that deploys a backdoored xz, the SSH daemon ends up loading the poisoned library during startup, via systemd, which alters the operation of the daemon. That meddling injects code that inspects incoming SSH connections for a specific set of circumstances that if met executes shell commands hidden in a payload supplied by the attacker during the connection initialization, giving the spy remote code execution on the machine.
"Currently, it appears as though the backdoor is added to the SSH daemon on the vulnerable machine, enabling a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code," said the Akamai Security Intelligence Group in a"This backdoor almost became one of the most significant intrusion enablers ever — one that would’ve dwarfed the SolarWinds backdoor. The attackers were almost able to gain immediate access to any Linux machine running an infected distro, which includes Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian.
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