Data breaches are always bad news, and this is peculiarly bad. Gentoo, a popular Linux distribution (or distro), has suffered the hacking of its repository on GitHub. The bad news is that it has been completely taken and modified, as pentest specialists report.
However, the Gentoo team did not give up and quickly issued a violation statement, making known that the Gentoo repository on GitHub is only a secondary copy of the Gentoo main source code and that the master repository is intact.
All changes to the Gentoo master repository are digitally signed and can therefore be verified. According to Gentoo, their primary signature key is secured, so digital signatures are reliable.
According pentest experts from the International Institute of Cyber Security, the Gentoo team began by thinking about the worst scenario to try to solve the situation from its possible consequences because.
If you are not a Linux user you may think this information is irrelevant, but this is not just Linux, Windows or any operating system. This is a reminder about the difficulty of keeping any system safe in this context.
What can we do?
Gentoo is a type of Linux distribution in which, unlike downloading files ready to run, the source code is downloaded and completed by the user.
The good news is that if you built it once, you can build it again, so if you recovered something from the GitHub-hosted version during the danger period, you can get rid of it and put it back together.
In the worst scenario, you may need to rebuild it by starting your system from the master repository to have a new start point.
Remember to keep an eye open for the official reports from Gentoo’s pentest specialists on the modifications made by hackers, and the damage that could have occurred during the time that the attack went unnoticed.
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
