Half a Second
- Welcome On March 29, 2024, a Microsoft engineer running a routine benchmark at home noticed that logging into a test machine was taking about half a second longer than it should.
- Almost anyone would have written it off as noise.
- He chased it instead, and found a backdoor: a hidden, deliberately built way into XZ Utils, a small compression tool that sits unnoticed on nearly every Linux system on Earth, including the servers that carry much of the traffic of the internet.
Unverified
- Welcome On March 29, 2024, a Microsoft engineer running a routine benchmark at home noticed that logging into a test machine was taking about half a second longer than it should.
- Almost anyone would have written it off as noise.
- He chased it instead, and found a backdoor: a hidden, deliberately built way into XZ Utils, a small compression tool that sits unnoticed on nearly every Linux system on Earth, including the servers that carry much of the traffic of the internet.
Sources: Half-second