FOSSPicks
FOSSPicks
Nate explores the top FOSS tools, including the latest KDE desktop, an ASCII art creator, a nostalgic homage to Quake, and the very latest secure browsers.
Open Dangers
As 2025 dawned, I was surprised to see an email in my inbox entitled "The Overlooked Risks of Open Source Software in Industrial Security" from a popular cybersecurity platform. The thrust of the argument was that open source adoption was dangerous due to bad actors potentially contributing malicious code.
Of course, I understand that proprietary software developers need to sell their products. Still, given the public scrutiny to which popular FOSS is subjected, it's unlikely that a version containing malicious code would go undetected for long. There's also nothing stopping companies from hiring developers to vet and customize open source code to their needs. Going closed source is certainly no guarantee of safety. At DEF CON 32, researcher Moritz Abrell recently revealed major flaws in an industrial remote-access gateway supposedly renowned for its security.
Of course, Microsoft engineer Andres Freund also discovered a back door in the open source xz utility last year. Still, it took around three years for bad actor "Jia Tan" to work himself into a position of trust and make obfuscated changes to the code. While Abrell hasn't revealed the time it took him to run a similar exploit on proprietary systems, it's safe to say he was able to do so considerably faster.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.