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   Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 06:54:19 JST Matt Blaze

   An interesting thing about the XZ sabotage is that, while it was very cleverly obfuscated (congratulations to Andres Freund for finding it!), once found, it is very clear that it's a deliberate backdoor. It can't be explained away as an ordinary bug that introduced a vulnerability.

   Says something about the tradeoff space the attacker was working in.

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     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 06:58:33 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Noah Cook

     @UncivilServant is disagree that that’s inconsistent with a state actor. Personalized, long game infiltration is how spies and HUMINT has always worked.

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     Noah Cook (uncivilservant@med-mastodon.com)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 06:58:34 JST Noah Cook

     in reply to

     @mattblaze You're one of the first I've seen to analyze this in terms of the adversary's constraints. I am not a computer scientist, but in terms of constraints, resources, and targeting, this doesn't "feel" like a state actor.

     So, this is highly targeted, and the social engineering tactics seemed personal. You're not getting that from a committee. And it was a long game, which would have meant supervisors coming and going, changes in priority, etc in government.