A Microsoft engineer is being hailed a hero after spotting a hidden ‘backdoor’ that could have been the prelude to an unprecedented cyberattack, the New York Times reported, targeting computers all over the world.
The programmer, who was doing some routine maintenance, inadvertently found the piece of software in the Linux operating system.
The German-born San Francisco engineer discovered someone had planted malicious code, known as a backdoor, that would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection – a network protocol that gives users, particularly system administrators, a secure way to access a computer over an unsecured network – and secretly run their own code on that user’s machine.
Read the full story: The New York Times
- By Sean O’Meara
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