Linux Hit by Malware

Linux community sites were taken offline due to a number of alleged malicious attacks that managed to dent the Linux’s myth of impenetrability.

The non-commercial Linux Foundation has published a message saying that it, Linux.com, and also all their subdomains had been taken down for the time of dealing with a security breach.

It is believed that the attack relates to an earlier intrusion on another Linux community website – Kernel.org. According to industry experts, the Linux Foundation and Kernel.org are actually online neighbours in the particular network block. However, LinuxFoundation.org has been offline for almost a week thus far, which is rather a considerable time for many.

The post explained that website administrators were in the “process of securely restoring all services as quickly as they only could”. However, they currently warn of a necessity to consider passwords and SSH keys that might have been used on the website.

For people claiming that Linux defences are close to unassailable, this news is a tad embarrassing of. Some of the malware experts admit it shouldn’t have come as a great surprise that Linux system’s security had failed. They confirm that there actually has been malware for Linux for a long time now, but lots of users didn’t realize it, because there was too much malware for Windows operating system in comparison.

Meanwhile, LinuxFoundation, when approached by the media in attempts to find out if there was any more information available, told that they are keeping to investigate and are currently doing whatever they can to expedite restoring all their domains. The company promised they would communicate with everyone when the service is back online. Unfortunately, they didn’t say anything else thus far. Nor they disclosed what kind of malware was the reason of websites failure or if it even was malware at all.

The news may mean that Linux is not that perfect as it used to be for many people, who mainly chose it for its consistence to malware attacks. Meanwhile, the attacks could at least mean that Linux operating system is considered prominent enough to serve as a target of criminal attention, thus playing down past accusations that it was “nothing more than hobby software”.