[Editor’s Note: I happened upon this article today and
thought it still pertinent to Linux Today readers, despite its
December 2003 publication date. -BKP]
“Near midnight, Andrea Barisani, system administrator in the
physics department of the University of Trieste, discovered that an
attacker had struck his institution’s Gentoo Linux server. He
traced the breach to a vulnerable spot in the Linux kernel and
another in rsync, a file transfer mechanism that automatically
replicates data among computers. This was a serious attack: Any
penetration of rsync could compromise files in thousands of servers
worldwide.“Barisani woke some colleagues, who put him in touch with Mike
Warfield, a senior researcher at Internet Security Systems in
Atlanta, and with Andrew ‘Tridge’ Tridgell, a well-known Linux
programmer in Australia on whose doctoral thesis rsync was
based…”