Fedora Project back online after hack

The Fedora Project has begun issuing updates to its Linux distribution following a hacker break-in.

The Red Hat supported project was placed on hiatus for several weeks after hackers broke into some of its servers that were involved with both its Red Hat Linux Enterprise offering and the Fedora Project.

Red Hat had provided security check tools for its corporate customers, in Australia a number of small businesses use Fedora, which is based on Red Hat code, in preference to paying support for Red Hat's corporate version of Linux.

Red Hat engineer and Fedora project release coordinator Jesse Keating wrote that the updates were designed to switch users to a new, secure set of update servers so that they could start using a new set of encryption keys to verify downloads.

However Fedora emailed its users to let them know that it would soon issue updates for its most recent Fedora 8 and 9 operating systems.

Keating wrote that users should apply the first set of updates as soon as possible then their systems would pick up a larger set of updates that they could download. Further steps would in future see the old encryption keys removed from use.

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is built as a community that is free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute.

It is the result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux (RHL) and old Fedora Linux projects in September 2003, and is officially sponsored by Red Hat, which has employees working on the project's code.

See original article on scmagazineuk.com

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