02.09.17
Gemini version available ♊︎OpenSUSE’s (or SUSE’s) Refusal to Publicly Acknowledge It Got Cracked Shows Face-Saving Arrogance Just Like Novell’s
SUSE (or MicroFocus) won’t even tell customers when its systems are in fact compromised
Summary: The same old and very notorious behaviour we found in Novell persists at SUSE under MicroFocus leadership; security neglected and keeping up appearances more important than honesty
TECHRIGHTS wrote many thousands of articles about Novell. We know Novell extremely well and we have documented its terrible behaviour for over half a decade, well before we began focusing on the EPO for example. As we shall show later, in a separate post, Microsoft’s and Novell’s “IP Peace of Mind” is making a comeback (as of last night), but right now we wish to focus on the crack I first wrote about on Monday (it has since then generated some press coverage, e.g. [1-3] below).
“Remember that no evidence has been presented by SUSE and moreover the gross negligence here is a bad sign in general.”A lot of people still miss the key point. IDG even went ahead with a rather misleading headline, as did Softpedia; rather than state the actual news (that OpenSUSE got cracked) the title says or overstates the ‘damage control’ from SUSE, diverting attention to what was not affected rather than what was affected (a politician’s trick). We used to see lots of that kind of spin back in the Novell days and the 2 articles below, having sought comment from SUSE, give SUSE the benefit of the doubt here. Remember that no evidence has been presented by SUSE and moreover the gross negligence here is a bad sign in general. That’s just “faith-based” security. My article about it was so short that it was mostly a screenshot, yet we understand that further coverage is on its way. So let’s elaborate a little. “They were using an outdated version of WordPress and got zapped,” one person wrote to me after I had published my findings. “It was just the front-end, no code was touched.” But says who? SUSE? Can we believe them?
“Nobody has yet covered that issue as properly as we hoped (poor security practices at SUSE) and the fact that they COMPLETELY FAILED or refused to publicly acknowledge what had happened is a serious aspect of it.”Whatever caused the defacement, it shows that they lost control of their platform. They did get cracked. Softpedia reported that “openSUSE devs immediately restored the news.opensuse.org website from a recent backup” (so the back end too appears to have been compromised).
Nobody has yet covered that issue as properly as we hoped (poor security practices at SUSE) and the fact that they COMPLETELY FAILED or refused to publicly acknowledge what had happened is a serious aspect of it. We waited patiently to see if an announcement would be made by then, even a reassurance that users should not worry. But nothing came out! To this date (half a week later). They attempted to cover it up, which is BAD BAD BAD. For a so-called “Enterprise-Grade” thing which SUSE tries to market itself as (selling SLE*) this is a serious breach of trust. Who would trust SUSE now?
“If someone injected a back door inside SLED and SLES, SUSE would probably say not a thing, only belatedly removing it and then lying about the whole thing, just like Microsoft does.”3 news sites and my own site wrote about it, but not a single word has been uttered by SUSE. They know they got cracked and they are not telling anyone, except when journalists ask them for comment (and press them with evidence).
OpenSUSE has a history of security issues in its sites (see “openSUSE Forum Hacked; 79500 Users Data Compromised” from 2014). Where are the reporters who are willing to ask SUSE some tough questions? Don’t let this slide. If someone injected a back door inside SLED and SLES, SUSE would probably say not a thing, only belatedly removing it and then lying about the whole thing, just like Microsoft does. █
In the news:
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Kurdish Hacker Posts Anti-ISIS Message on openSUSE’s Website, Data Remains Safe
Softpedia was informed by Dr. Roy Schestowitz that the openSUSE News (news.opensuse.org) website got defaced by Kurdish hacker MuhmadEmad on the day of February 6, 2017.
It would appear that the server where the news.opensuse.org website is hosted is isolated from the rest of openSUSE’s infrastructure, which means that the hacker did not have access to any contributor data, such as email and passwords, nor to the ISO images of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
We already talked with openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown, who confirms for Softpedia that the offered openSUSE downloads remain safe and consistent, and users should not worry about anything. The vigilant openSUSE devs immediately restored the news.opensuse.org website from a recent backup, so everything is operating normally at this time.
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OpenSUSE site hacked; quickly restored
The openSUSE team acted quickly to restore the site. When I talked to Richard Brown, openSUSE chairman, he said that “the server that hosts ‘news.opensuse.org’ is isolated from the majority of openSUSE infrastructure by design, so there was no breach of any other part of openSUSEs infrastructure, especially our build, test and download systems. Our offered downloads remain safe and consistent and there was no breach of any openSUSE contributor data.”
The team is still investigating the reason for the breach so I don’t have much information. The site ran a WordPress install and it seems that WordPress was compromised.
This site is not managed by the SUSE or openSUSE team. It is handled by the IT team of MicroFocus. However, Brown said that SUSE management certainly doesn’t want any such incident to happen again and they are considering moving the site to the infrastructure managed by SUSE and openSUSE team.
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Best Distros, openSUSE Whoops, Debian 9 One Step Closer
In the latest Linux news, the news.opensuse.org got hacked and displayed “KurDish HaCk3rS WaS Here” for a while Monday and while the site has been restored, no comment on the hack has been issued. Elsewhere, Debian 9.0 has entered its final freeze in the last steps in preparations for release. FOSS Force has named their winner for top distro of 2016 and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his picks for the best for 2017. Blogger DarkDuck said MX-16 Xfce is “very close to the ideal” and Alwan Rosyidi found Solus OS is giving Elementary OS a run for its money. Phoronix.com’s Michael Larabel explained why he uses Fedora and Jeremy Garcia announced the winners of the 2016 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards.
[...]
openSUSE’s news portal was compromised Monday by a hacker or group of hackers called MuhmadEmad, via the message left in its place. A Kurdish flag with the message “HaCkeD by MuhmadEmad – KurDish HaCk3rS WaS Here” was displayed for hours before it was taken down and the site’s content restored. Roy Schestowitz has a screen capture and said that openSUSE has not yet publicly acknowledged the hack. Swapnil Bhartiya spoke to Richard Brown, openSUSE chairman, who said that site was isolated from most SUSE infrastructure, especially the distribution code. There was no breach of any contributor data either. The site in question is run by MicroFocus, but all are investigating to make sure it’s an isolated incident.
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