How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Linux, the most widely used open source operating system in the world, narrowly escaped a massive cyber attack over Easter weekend, all thanks to one volunteer.

The backdoor had been inserted into a recent release of a Linux compression format called XZ Utils, a tool that is little-known outside the Linux world but is used in nearly every Linux distribution to compresses large files, making them easier to transfer. If it had …

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