14 DAY TRIAL // Softpedia was informed by Dr. Roy Schestowitz that the openSUSE News (news.opensuse.org) website got defaced by Kurdish hacker MuhmadEmad on the day of February 6, 2017.
It would appear that the server where the news.opensuse.org website is hosted is isolated from the rest of OpenSuSE's infrastructure, which means that the hacker did not have access to any contributor data, such as email and passwords, nor to the ISO images of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
We have already talked with openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown, who confirms for Softpedia that the offered openSUSE downloads remain safe and consistent, and users should not worry about anything. The vigilant openSUSE devs immediately restored the news.opensuse.org website from a recent backup, so everything is operating normally at this time.
"Yes it got defaced," said Richard Brown, openSUSE Chairman. "That server is isolated from the majority of openSUSE infrastructure by design, so there was no breach of any other of openSUSE's infrastructure, especially our build, test & download systems. Our offered downloads remain safe and consistent and there was no breach of any openSUSE contributor data."
The hacker only displayed the Kurdistan flag and wrote an anti-ISIS message
All that the hacker did was to display the Kurdistan flag and wrote an anti-ISIS message, as you can see from the screenshot attached, courtesy of Dr. Roy Schestowitz of Tux Machines, who also sent us the code, which you can see below. Currently, openSUSE's devs are working with their hosting provider where the news.opensuse.org website is hosted to prevent such attacks in the future.
It also appears that this is not an isolated event, as the Kurdish hacker, which is a member of the “KurdLinux_Team” hacktivist group, managed to deface more than 50,000 websites. As such, we have no reason to believe that the hacker wanted to attack openSUSE's infrastructure to steal data or cause damage, but only to display an anti-ISIS message.