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#xzbackdoor#ssh#jiatan

The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster And No One Knew

Veritasium

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YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

16M views8 months ago1 recommendation

SecuritySystems programmingExploits and vulnerabilitiesLinuxOpen source

Derek Muller explains how a patient attacker inserted a backdoor into the XZ compression library, nearly compromising SSH on Linux systems worldwide.

How a single hack infected the world’s most important operating system. Sponsored by NordVPN - Get exclusive NordVPN deal here: NordVPN.com/veritasium It’s risk free with Nord’s 30 day money-back guarantee! If you’re looking for a molecular modelling kit, try Snatoms, a kit I invented where the atoms snap together magnetically - ve42.co/SnatomsV Sign up for the Veritasium newsletter for weekly science updates - ve42.co/Newsletter ▀▀▀ The Free Software Foundation Why is Linux so popular? The XZ Weakness End To End Encryption - SSH How To Compress Data How The .XZ Hack Worked A Bug In Jia’s Code Henry Hacks Derek The Back Door Is Exposed Who is Jia Tan? Open Vs Closed Source ▀▀▀ A huge thank you to everyone who made this possible: Rich Jones for his openness throughout this project. Denzel Farmer for his incredible breakdown - youtu.be/Q6ovtLdSbEA?si=qlbcg6skR-BoS5z1 Karsten Nohl @hackingmatters, Yannis Hofmann, and Matthias Marx at SRLabs for their help throughout this project. Fabian Fäßler @LiveOverflow Alex Schlögl and the rest of the Cure53 team for their technical insights on the project. Tom Scott, and Computerphile for their excellent videos on compression. Josh at @breakfastserial for the filming inspiration. Planet Money for a podcast that helped inform our research and @fern-tv for inspiration. Thomas Roccia for his technical feedback on the video. And Ed at @LowLevelTV for helping out early on! ▀▀▀ References: ve42.co/XZHackRefs ▀▀▀ Special thanks to our Patreon supporters: Adam Foreman, Albert Wenger, Alex Porter, Alexander Tamas, Anton Ragin, armedtoe, Balkrishna Heroor, Bertrand Serlet, Blake Byers, Bruce, Charles Ian Norman Venn, Daniel Martins, Data Don, Dave Kircher, David Johnston, David Tseng, EJ Alexandra, Evgeny Skvortsov, Garrett Mueller, Gnare, gpoly, Hayden Christensen, Hong Thai Le, Ibby Hadeed, Jeromy Johnson, Jesse Brandsoy, Jon Jamison, Juan Benet, Kelcey Steele, KeyWestr, Kyi, Lee Redden, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Mark Heising, Martin Paull, Meekay, meg noah, Michael Krugman, Moebiusol - Cristian, Orlando Bassotto, Parsee Health, Paul Peijzel, Richard Sundvall, Robson, Sam Lutfi, Shalva Bukia, Sinan Taifour, Tj Steyn, Ubiquity Ventures, Vahe Andonians, wolfee ▀▀▀ Writer, Director & Producer: Henry van Dyck Presenters: Derek Muller & Henry van Dyck Editor: Trenton Oliver Animators: Fabio Albertelli, Domonkos Józsa, Andrew Neet, Alex Drakoulis & Emma Wright Illustrators: Jakub Misiek & Nataly Zhuk Researchers: Aakash Singh Bagga & Sophia Rose Additional Editing: James Stuart & Peter Nelson Thumbnail Designers: Abdallah Rabah, Ren Hurley, Ben Powell & Henry van Dyck Production Team: Josh Pitt, Matthew Cavanagh, Anna Milkovic, Katy Southwood & Jess Bishop-Laggett Executive Producers: Derek Muller & Casper Mebius Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images & Storyblocks Music from Epidemic Sound

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating and accessible documentary explaining the XZ backdoor incident and how open-source security works.

ajoyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised”

Reminded me of a similar story at openSSH, wonderfully documented in a "Veritasium" episode , which was just fascinating to watch/listen. link to this video

nerevarthelameon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Story of XZ Backdoor [video]”

Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video link to this video : > A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious. > And they also worked on Chinese New Year, but not on Christmas. And over the years, there were nine changes that fall outside of the Beijing time into UTC+2, which is a time zone that includes Israel and parts of Western Russia. That's why some experts have speculated that this could be the work of APT29, a…

briansmon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Xkcd thing, now interactive”

Just to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video: "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew" link to this video (at about the 9:50 mark)

rolandogon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived”

Agreed. However, I often wonder if people like that are deliberately (or inadvertently) being a psyop seeking to burn out people ala how "Jia Tan" tried to become maintainer of xz 0. 0 link to this video