this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Any speculations on the target(s) of the attack? With stuxnet the US and Israel were willing to to infect the the whole world to target a few nuclear centrifuges in Iran.
Definitely state sponsored attack. It could be any nation - US to North Korea, and any other nation in between.
There is some indication based on commit times and the VPN used that it's somewhere in Asia. Really interesting detail in this write up.
The timezone bit is near the end iirc.
Good writeup.
The use of ephemeral third party accounts to "vouch" for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn't easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it's hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.
I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.
Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don't know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren't that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).
Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.
What is the trail of crumbs? Just some random email accounts?
This was in a big part a social engineering attack, so you can't really avoid contact.
Stuxnet was an extremely focused attack, targeting specific software on specific PLCs in a specific way to prevent them mixing up nuclear batter into a boom boom cake. Even if it managed to affect the whole world, it would be a laser compared to this wide-net.
Given how low level it is and the timespan involved, there probably wasn't a specific use in mind. Just adding capability for a future attack to be determined later.
My guesses wildly range on this topic.
I could think of many other scenarios and outcomes if I put enough time, but I think this should be enough food for thought. The beneficiaries are limited, the actors few, and the methods cannot vary too much.
The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn't possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It's quite clear by now there's faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I'd put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.
Funny coincidence for me, but I just learned this listening to a podcast called Behind the Bastards: The Ballad of Bill Gates. It talked about how one of the reasons MS became so big was because so many people shared MS BASIC back in the day, but then Gates worked so hard against piracy afterwards despite that fact. So basically just one aspect of what you are talking about.
The first 3 seem incredibly far-fetched.
I think it's likey that, of all the mainstream compression formats, lzma was the least audited (after all, it was being maintained by one overworked person). Zstd has lots of eyes on it from Google and Facebook, all of the most talented experts in the world on data compression contributing to it, and lots of contributors. Zlib has lots of forks and overall probably more attention than lzma. Bz2 is rarely used anymore. So that leaves lzma
Cloudflare deploys Zstd, and many web servers and CDNs use it. Endless possibilities for Facebook and US gov. They can put Yann Collet out of the way or gag order him.
LZMA is the highest compression algorithm outside of PAQ and SuperRep+LOLZ, while being magnitudes faster than both. Zstd compression ratio is a joke and is only good for webpage asset loading times.
Facebook may be evil but I don't think they're anywhere near "inject malware into global supply chains to push adoption of a public engineering side project that they don't directly profit from and most executives don't care about" level of evil. Is it possible? Sure anything is possible, but that is wildly beyond many many more plausible explanations and there's zero evidence leading us down this path. And why would they go through the trouble of backdooring zstd, which has a highly observed codebase, when they just successfully backdoored lzma because it didn't have a lot of maintainers?
While it's true that zstd is commonly favored for having "good" compression at blazingly fast speeds, which is useful on the web and on servers, Zstd 's max compression setting (
zstd --long -19) is actually within about 5% of LZMA's but faster, so it replaces most use cases of LZMA except when that extra 5% (and that's not even constant; some inputs are even better on zstd) really does matter at all speed costI have extensively benchmarked Zstd and it is a joke compared to LZMA2 when it comes to compression ratio. And not even that, the lack of features Zstd has, that 7Z does have, makes it a far bigger joke. 7Z is a feature complete archival solution unlike Zstd, with possible options for archive repair. RAR is far superior for that bitrot resistance.
The amount of possibilities Facebook and US gov get with backdooring XZ are endless, since it could destroy trust in it if uncaught, and Zstd adoption meant web malware deployment could become a matter of when, because Facebook already does it right now with actual malware JS scripts through fbcdn domain.
This is why it surprised me to learn that this was noticed/announced by an MS employee.
I'd be super surprised if this was western intelligence. Stuxnet escaping Natanz was an accident, and there is no way that an operation like this would get approved by the NSAs Vulnerabilities Equities Process.
My money would be MSS or GRU. Outside chance this is North Korean, but doesn't really feel like their MO