All Linux Foundation Sites Down, Security Breach to Blame

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 13 Sep 2011

It seems that The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, uncovered a security breach which is believed to be connected with the intrusion on kernel.org. As a little reminder, earlier this month hackers hit some high-value servers belonging to kernel.org, but the administrators at kernel.org discovered the breach and stopped the hackers before they had a chance to do any major damage. The attack only damaged the reputation of kernel.org, it did not impact the integrity of the Linux kernel source code.

Getting back to the topic at hand, The Linux Foundation suspects that the security breach it uncovered may have compromised usernames, passwords, email addresses, and other info users have given the Foundation. All Linux Foundation sites and their subdomains have been closed so that the Foundation can investigate the breach and restore services in a secure manner.

If you will visit LinuxFoundation.org or Linux.com , you will be greeted with a message that provides a brief explanation on what happened.
“We apologize for the inconvenience. We are taking this matter seriously and appreciate your patience. The Linux Foundation infrastructure houses a variety of services and programs including Linux.com, Open Printing, Linux Mark, Linux Foundation events and others, but does not include the Linux kernel or its code repositories,” says the prompt on LinuxFoundation.org and Linux.com

It is yet unclear what the source of the attack is. The Linux Foundation explained that it is aggressively investigating the source of the attack to figure it all out. In the meantime, you should consider your passwords and SSH keys for Linux Foundation sites compromised. If you’re in the habit of reusing passwords and you used your password for Linux.com or LinuxFoundation.org on other sites, you should change it as soon as possible.

For additional information on this topic you can contact The Linux Foundation vie email at info@linuxfoundation.org.


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