GNU servers hacked

BANGALORE: The GNU project has admitted that its FTP servers have been hacked. The organization says "A root compromise and a Trojan horse were discovered on gnuftp.gnu.org, the FTP server of the GNU project. The machine appears to have been cracked in March 2003, but we only discovered the crack in the last week of July 2003."

It was said that the modus operandi of the cracker, shows that (s)he was interested primarily in using ‘gnuftp’ to collect passwords and as a launching point to attack other machines. The machine apparently was cracked, using a ‘ptrace’ exploit by a local user immediately after the exploit was posted.

Developers fear that some of the source code of various GNU projects, may have also been compromised. The organization, however, says it has checked the code and has now provided a list of valid checksums for the code.

The files that have not been checked are listed in the root directory as "MISSING-FILES". The organization is in the process of asking GNU maintainers for trusted secure checksums of those files before it is put in place.