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ELI5: The Linux xz backdoor situation
(pawb.social)
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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Explain Like I'm Five
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While the full extent of the exploit is not fully known, it seems specifically targeted at the sshd binary on deb and rpm based systems. If you've got that service disabled it should not have been running actively on your system. You should still perform whatever is needed to downgrade, but I would say you're in the clear.
What if you had the service enabled on an Arch based distro?
Each distribution is different but Arch has stated that they did have the exploit artifact in their version of xz but the artifact was not loaded into memory with sshd as their process does not link sshd with liblzma library.
More details below but highly recommend upgrade/downgrade anyways to remove the exploit code version.
https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-package-has-been-backdoored/