When the xz backdoor was discovered, I quickly uninstalled my Arch based setup with an infected version of the software and switched to a distro that shipped an older version (5.5 or 5.4 or something). I found an article which said that in 5.6.1-3 the backdoor was “fixed” by just not letting the malware part communicating with the vulnerable ssh related stuff and the actual malware is still there? (I didn’t understand 80% of the technical terms and abbreviations in it ok?) Like it still sounds kinda dangerous to me, especially since many experts say that we don’t know the other ways this malware can use (except for the ssh supply chain) yet. Is it true? Should I stick with the new distro for now or can I absolutely safely switch back and finally say that I use Arch btw again?
P. S. I do know that nothing is completely safe. Here I’m asking just about xz and libxzlk or whatever the name of that library is
Yeah, I checked myself when this was first a thing. Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 latest are on 5.4 and 5.2 respectively.
Yeah, all the current LTSes should be safe. Not sure about the Ubuntu 23.10, but the next LTS (24.04) is confirmed to be affected, hence the delay.
Not quite. It wasn’t confirmed to be affected, but they can’t prove that the build environment itself wasn’t compromised, thus the rebuild.
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-beta-delayed-xz-liblzma-security-update/43827
And in the follow-up:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/xz-liblzma-security-update-post-2/43801
Thanks for the correction!