XZ Backdoor: How to check if your systems are affected?

A principal software engineer at Microsoft by the name of Andres Freund accidentally stomped upon a backdoor within XZ, the popular compression library. This discovery happened because he noticed both a 500ms delay for ssh as well as the sshd processes using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc. He researched this and on March 29th, 2024 posted his findings on oss-security, a popular mailing list, avoiding a worldwide disaster in the open-source …

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