The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew

The podcast explores the 2024 XZ Utils backdoor incident, dissecting how a malicious actor, potentially state-sponsored, infiltrated the open-source project XZ Utils to compromise OpenSSH, a critical component for secure remote logins. It highlights the social engineering tactics used to gain trust within the open-source community, the technical intricacies of the backdoor involving binary blobs, iFunc resolvers, and dynamic audit hooks, and the potential impact, which could have included widespread access to millions of servers. The discussion emphasizes the role of Andres Freund, who discovered the backdoor due to a performance slowdown. It also considers the broader implications for open-source security and the challenges of maintaining the integrity of widely used software maintained by volunteers.