GNU servers hacked

By Steve Malone

Posted on 14 Aug 2003 at 11:07

The GNU Project has admitted that its FTP servers have been hacked. The organisation says that the servers were compromised as far back as March but only came to light at the end of July.

The Free Software Foundation which is the sponsor of GNU says that a root compromise and a Trojan were found on gnuftp.gnu.org. The motive behind the attack is said to be to collect passwords and as a launch pad for other attacks.

The biggest danger that remains is that some of the source code of various GNU projects have also been compromised. The FSF says it has spent some time checking the code and has now provided a list of valid checksums for the code which the GNU site. Anyone who has downloaded code from the FTP server or a mirror server should check their code is valid.