Gentoo server goes down after Ubuntu

Aug 20, 2007 07:09 GMT  ·  By

Many parts of the official Gentoo website have been taken down due to hacker attacks. There is no telling when their website will be fully back online.

Gentoo is an open OS that is based on the Linux technology (which has Unix as a platform as well) that has great maneuverability. Gentoo Linux is very easy to configure and to adapt to a person's own needs, that's why it's a very well known brand all around the world.

Last week, Ubuntu (another open Linux-based OS distribution) has announced that they have unplugged 5 servers sponsored by Canonicals because they had been severely infected and now they were attacking other computers. Today, it was reported that Gentoo is affected by a somehow similar glitch that might cause some unexpected results for the visitors of the official webpage.

As according to The Register, the Gentoo site might have been severely damaged, even though Gentoo officials have not said too much on this matter, but they have taken a server down. Even though the date when they will get the site properly running again has not been announced, the Gentoo people are working hard on this matter in order to solve it as fast as they can.

Their site was vulnerable to code injection, fact which would have been exploited by hackers as soon as they would have discovered it. As Gentoo Bugzilla shows us, code could have been remotely executed, on the website where the output of the command could be displayed at the bottom of the page. This vulnerability was critical for them, since a big part of the site is now down. To prevent the hack, one server had been yanked out for repairs, and that's what causes the unavailability. The parts of the official site of Gentoo that have been affected by the server going down are: archives, packagetest, scripts, archivetest, kiss, packages, stats and survey, according to the official website. They are going to install more security measures, so they will be somewhat safer.