Kernel.org gets hacked.

2011-10-08 10:36:44

If you haven't noticed, but kernel.org got hacked recently. Security is a rather interesting topic. I believe that most, if not all systems are hackable.

Reason systems are hackable:

-Software is flawed. All software is flawed because people are flawed. Computers today usually contain millions of lines of code to help people perform simple tasks. In those millions of lines of code, there can be all sorts of potential flaws a hacker could exploit. An example is the Playstation 3 USB hack. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz)

-People are flawed. Evan if you have software that is perfect, you can usually convince people to do something stupid. Take Kevin Mitnick for example(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick). Most of his hacks were social networking hacks.


In the end, I think it is important to remember that we are not secure. Things are going to get stolen, and we should have a plan B. In the case of Kernel.org, they had a plan B. Git was a distributed source control system, so it didn't matter if someone nuked their servers, they had copies of the source control all over the place.

-Kim