Linux distribution hosted on GitHub was hacked

A popular Linux distribution, Gentoo, said its source code hosted on GitHub was compromised. 

Gentoo said unknown cybercriminals gained unauthorized access to GitHub Gentoo organization and modified GitHub repositories and pages. However, the breach did not affect code hosted on Gentoo’s internal infrastructure. 

Gentoo released an announcement on Thursday: 

“Today 28 June at approximately 20:20 UTC unknown individuals have gained control of the Github Gentoo organization, and modified the content of repositories as well as pages there. We are still working to determine the exact extent and to regain control of the organization and its repositories.

All Gentoo code hosted on github should for the moment be considered compromised. This does NOT affect any code hosted on the Gentoo infrastructure. Since the master Gentoo ebuild repository is hosted on our own infrastructure and since Github is only a mirror for it, you are fine as long as you are using rsync or webrsync from gentoo.org.

Also, the gentoo-mirror repositories including metadata are hosted under a separate Github organization and likely not affected as well.

All Gentoo commits are signed, and you should verify the integrity of the signatures when using git.

More updates will follow.”

The main Gentoo repository appears to be intact. Changes to Gentoo source code are digitally signed and can thus be verified. 

We will post additional updates from Gentoo as they are made available.  

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