Linux Mint Hacked

[WildBill]

In view of the ongoing thread about the iPhone software I thought this might be interesting to some of the forum members.

Linux Mint forum users, and anyone who downloaded and installed a copy of the 17.3 Cinnamon edition on Saturday
have probably been compromised by hackers and need to take action immediately, the distro's creator has warned.
Clem Lefebvre, confirmed in a blog post that the "intrusion" had taken place over the weekend.
He said: "Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it."

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/02 ... ck-attack/

Last night, Some unknown hacker or group of hackers had managed to hack into the Linux Mint website and replaced the download
links on the site that pointed to one of their servers offering a malicious ISO images for the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Edition.
"Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it," the head of
Linux Mint project Clement Lefebvre said in a surprising announcement dated February 21, 2016.

http://thehackernews.com/2016/02/linux-mint-hack.html

[Smokey]

Glad they detected it quickly.

From that post

Are you also the one who downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th?

[WildBill]

Glad they detected it quickly.

From that post

Are you also the one who downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th?

There are a few Linux users on the forum, but I am not one of them.

[rtschl]

Glad I run it in a virtual machine and only when using it. Nothing important is accessible. Need to destroy that VM and ISO though when I get home later this week.

[SA_Steve]

main mint website was still down this morning.

I downloaded it a few days before the hack, via the torrent which was supposed to be safe, then yesterday I noticed they said their forum was also hacked a month earlier by the same bad guys. The hack came in through a wordpress forum add-on. That's the stuff that runs their website. I deleted my download and will try in another few days when the coast is likely clear.

[Smokey]

WordPress plug-ins are notorious. You are basically hoping that the developer didn't make any mistakes and patches them quickly if they did. And having the official downloads on the same server as wordpress probably not a great security practice.