When the xz backdoor was discovered, I quickly uninstalled my Arch based setup with an infected version of the software and switched to a distro that shipped an older version (5.5 or 5.4 or something). I found an article which said that in 5.6.1-3 the backdoor was “fixed” by just not letting the malware part communicating with the vulnerable ssh related stuff and the actual malware is still there? (I didn’t understand 80% of the technical terms and abbreviations in it ok?) Like it still sounds kinda dangerous to me, especially since many experts say that we don’t know the other ways this malware can use (except for the ssh supply chain) yet. Is it true? Should I stick with the new distro for now or can I absolutely safely switch back and finally say that I use Arch btw again?
P. S. I do know that nothing is completely safe. Here I’m asking just about xz and libxzlk or whatever the name of that library is
EDIT: 69 upvotes. Nice
Fedora 39 and 40 (which is still in beta) uses xz 5.4. Fedora 41/rawhide (essentially the development branch) was affected it seems: https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2024-3094. CentOS Stream and RHEL have way more outdated packages than that, so they were never vulnerable to this backdoor.
openSUSE Tumbleweed (their rolling release) was affected: https://news.opensuse.org/2024/03/29/xz-backdoor/, Enterprise or Leap were unaffected.
Ah, so the .rpm is pretty much like the .deb in that it’s mostly unaffected. Speaking of, I think the .deb side may have VanillaOS affected since it’s based on Debian’s unstable branch.