Apache Software Foundation site hacked

The web site of open source organisation the Apache Software Foundation, was taken down yesterday after hackers compromised the SSH key for one of its servers.

Trend Micro senior security advisor Rik Ferguson was among the first to notice the incident, which took down Apache’s server for several hours.

"Details of the attack/compromise are few at the moment, as this is breaking news," he wrote at the time.

"It is worth remembering however that a compromised SSH key led to in-the-wild exploitation of Linux based systems exactly this time last year, for the purposes of installing rootkits."

As Ferguson mentioned in his blog, the attack is significant in that around half of all web servers run Apache.

The organisation yesterday filed an official report explaining the attack.

"On August 27th, starting at about 18.00 UTC an acount used for automated backups for the ApacheCon web site hosted on a 3rd party hosting provider was used to upload files to minotaur.apache.org. The account was accessed using SSH key authentication from this host," it read.

"To the best of our knowledge at this time no end users were affected by this incident, and the attackers were not able to escalate their priviledges on any machines. While we have no evidence that dowloads were affected users are always advised tocheck digital signatures where provided."

It’s still not clear who carried out the attack or for what ends.