A well-maintained secure operating system, like Linux, can be safe. But, that doesn’t mean that a Website built on top of it is necessarily safe. The Linux Foundation has found out the hard way. The Linux Foundation’s main site, and related sites such as Linux.com are still down after a break-in was discovered on September 8th.
This attack came on the heels of the main Linux development site, kernel.org, being compromised in late August. Kernel.org is still down. In the meantime, Linus Torvalds has uploaded the mainline Linux source code to GitHub. This is a site that uses Git, a distributed version control system, for distributed software development. Once kernel.org is back in working order though Torvalds will be returning the code to it.
But while work continues apace on this site and over the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), the Linux Foundation sites remain dark. If you visit these sites you’ll find the following message: