XZ Hack - "If this timeline is correct, it’s not the modus operandi of a hobbyist. [...] It wouldn’t be surprising if it was paid for by a state actor."
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career. Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of
Thought this was a good read exploring some how the "how and why" including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.
You're viewing a single thread.
67 comments
Any speculations on the target(s) of the attack? With stuxnet the US and Israel were willing to to infect the the whole world to target a few nuclear centrifuges in Iran.
Stuxnet was an extremely focused attack, targeting specific software on specific PLCs in a specific way to prevent them mixing up nuclear batter into a boom boom cake. Even if it managed to affect the whole world, it would be a laser compared to this wide-net.
Definitely state sponsored attack. It could be any nation - US to North Korea, and any other nation in between.
There is some indication based on commit times and the VPN used that it's somewhere in Asia. Really interesting detail in this write up.
The timezone bit is near the end iirc.
Good writeup.
The use of ephemeral third party accounts to "vouch" for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn't easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it's hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.
I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.
Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don't know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren't that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).
Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.
What is the trail of crumbs? Just some random email accounts?
This was in a big part a social engineering attack, so you can't really avoid contact.
Given how low level it is and the timespan involved, there probably wasn't a specific use in mind. Just adding capability for a future attack to be determined later.
I'd be super surprised if this was western intelligence. Stuxnet escaping Natanz was an accident, and there is no way that an operation like this would get approved by the NSAs Vulnerabilities Equities Process.
My money would be MSS or GRU. Outside chance this is North Korean, but doesn't really feel like their MO
