Hackers Have A Bone to Pick with Linux

Many parts of the official Gentoo website have been taken down due to hacker attacks. There is no telling when their website will be fully back online. Gentoo is an open OS that is based on Linux or FreeBSD (which has Unix as a platform as well) that has great maneuverability. Gentoo Linux is very easy to configure and to adapt to a person’s own needs, that’s why it’s a very well known brand all around the world. Last week, Ubuntu (another open Linux-based OS developer) has announced that they have unplugged 5 of their eight servers because they had been severely infected and now they were attacking other computers and now Gentoo suffers as well.

As according to The Register, the Gentoo site might have been severely damaged, even though Gentoo officials have not said too much on this matter, but they have taken a server down. Even though the date when they will get the site properly running again has not been announced, the Gentoo people are working hard on this matter in order to solve it as fast as they can.

Their site was vulnerable to code injection, fact which had been exploited by hackers as soon as they discovered it. As Gentoo Bugzilla shows us, code has been remotely executed, on the website where the output of the command was displayed at the bottom of the page. This vulnerability was critical for them, since a big part of the site is now down. After the hack had happened one server had been yanked out for repairs, and that’s what causes the unavailability. The parts of gentoo.org that have been affected by the server going down are: archives, packagetest, scripts, archivetest, kiss, packages, stats and survey, according to the official website.

They are going to install more security measures, so they will be somewhat safer, but there are some questions: are there going to be more attacks on Linux based OS developers? Is this just a rabid hacker or has he been hired by another company to attack them? Or is it all just a coincidence?