They received a lot of help from the community

Mar 2, 2016 10:55 GMT  ·  By

The Linux Mint team is recovering from the website attack in February that seriously affected their credibility. The lead developer of the project, Clement Lefebvre explained in great detail everything that happened.

Linux Mint users were informed a couple of weeks ago that someone managed to hack their website and replaced the download links for Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon ISO. People were redirected to a modified Linux Mint ISO that had a rather old trojan named TSUNAMI.

As you can imagine, the hack had a powerful impact in the Linux community. It wasn't just about a hacked website or compromised users data from the forum. The fact that people downloaded and installed a modified version of a Linux operating systems seems to be the biggest issue. Even if not a lot of users downloaded the ISO, it's still a problem.

Linux Mint working to repair the damage

The team is now working to fix the image of the project and the first step in this process is to inform the users about everything that happened. Nothing was held back, and we now know the entire timeline of the events.

"Since that Saturday night on February 20th, all our efforts went towards protecting our project and our community. After the despicable attacks on our website and the deliberate attempts at hurting our users, we had to react fast and efficiently. The compromised server was shut down, all ongoing projects were stopped and all our time, efforts and resources were used to address the situation," Clement Lefebvre explained.

The team received a lot of help from the community, from phpBB, Automattic (WordPress.com), and Avast. In fact, Avast identified the problems with the fake ISO and pushed some fixes for their own users.

The overall response of the community was impressive, and most people seem to understand this was an unfortunate event and that they have done everything humanly possible.