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Screenshot of github showing part of the commit message of this commit with this text:
Remove the backdoor found in 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 (CVE-2024-3094).
While the backdoor was inactive (and thus harmless) without inserting
a small trigger code into the build system when the source package was
created, it's good to remove this anyway:
- The executable payloads were embedded as binary blobs in
the test files. This was a blatant violation of the
Debian Free Software Guidelines.
- On machines that see lots bots poking at the SSH port, the backdoor
noticeably increased CPU load, resulting in degraded user experience
and thus overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
- The maintainer who added the backdoor has disappeared.
- Backdoors are bad for security.
This reverts the following without making any other changes:
The sentence "This was a blatant violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines" is highlighted.
Below the github screenshot is a frame of the 1998 film The Big Lebowski with the meme caption "What, are you a fucking park ranger now?" from the scene where that line was spoken.
Another speculation from the suse team was a private company with intent to sell the exploit to state ~~across~~ actors
I think there's lots of known backdoors that are not publicly disclosed and privately sold.
But given the history of cves in inclined to believe most come from well intentioned developers. When you read the blogs from the Google security team for example, it's interesting to see how you need to chain a couple exploits at least, to get a proper attack going. Not in this case, it would make it very straightforward to accomplish very intrusive actions.