Xubuntu Site Possibly Hacked
It appears that the Xubuntu site was hacked and briefly served up a malicious ZIP file from its download page.
From the office of "Please say this is an early April Fools joke" comes a user (onechroma) who has reported that the Xubuntu download site was serving up a malicious .zip file. After clicking the Download button on the site, the user claimed the file Xubuntu-Safe-Download.zip was offered instead of the expected ISO file. The file was flagged as a Trojan by VirusTotal.
In the report on Reddit, onechroma states that the malicious file was a crypto clipper that was designed to hijack crypto transactions by replacing the innocent victim's wallet address with that of the attacker. Fortunately, after 12 hours, the Xubuntu team deleted the file and has temporarily disabled redirects to avoid further issues.
The report also speculates that the malware was written via AI. While the malware was very basic, it was working. The Trojan was active for approximately six hours, but there is no indication as to how many times the file was downloaded.
This comes shortly after the Arch User Repository (AUR) was hacked and was distributing malicious code, giving rise to the need for distribution sites and repositories to up their security to avoid further incidents. Given that Xubuntu is an official spin of Ubuntu, Canonical might want to consider stepping in and bolstering the security of these projects.
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