Notes
A image is worth 1.000 words and the picture tells it all.
it’s really surprising, to say the least, that fundamental building blocks of internet code is developed and maintained by a handful of pro-bono experts that underpin the entire eco-system.
Goes without saying that situations like the one exposed might be the rule and not the exception.
Additionally, the attack was detected by another expert user that has detected that the system to log-on securely to another device was 500 milliseconds slower and while investing the root-causes for such delay found the attack (a back door that would impact all systems that use this code) that could have compromised almost all systems!
The story explained in the Economist article, as an overview, and in greater detail in the YouTube link (in Spanish), sounds like a Bond’s movie with all the ingredients necessary to make a blockbuster.
My takeaways are:
how can an entire fundamental eco-system be created and maintained as an unpaid hobby by some highly expert geeks,
how can it be easily hacked by malicious parties.
how the controls in place are fragile and serendipitous,
how many situations like that might have happened in the past or might happen in the future getting unnoticed.
A stealth attack came close to compromising the world’s computers economist.com/science-and-technology/20… from The Economist
