I'm curious to know about the distro maintainers that were running bleeding edge with this exploit present. How do we know the bad actors didn't compromise their systems in the interim ?

The potential of this would have been catastrophic had it made its way into the stable versions, they could have for example accessed the build server for tor or tails or signal and targeted the build processes . not to mention banks and governments and who knows what else... Scary.

I'm hoping things change and we start looking at improving processes in the whole chain. I'd be interested to see discussions in this area.

I think the fact they targeted this package means that other similar packages will be attacked. A good first step would be identifying those packages used by many projects and with one or very few devs even more so if it has root access. More Devs means chances of scrutiny so they would likely go for packages with one or few devs to improve the odds of success.

I also think there needs to be an audit of every package shipped in the distros. A huge undertaking , perhaps it can be crowdsourced and the big companies FAAGMN etc should heavily step up here and set up a fund for audits .

What do you think could be done to mitigate or prevent this in future ?