Linux distros infected with backdoors; McAfee offers to hack iPhone; Telco complaints at 9-year low

The website of Linux distribution Mint has been hacked and made to link to downloadable ISOs of the distros that are infected with backdoors.

In a blog post earlier this week, a user called ‘Clem’ — presumably Mint’s Project Leader Clement Lefebvre — revealed that Mint’s website had been compromised.

“We were exposed to an intrusion today,” Clem wrote. “Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.”

The blog post included instructions on how to identify a compromised ISO, and what to do if such an ISO had been used.

“What we don’t know is the motivation behind this attack. If more efforts are made to attack our project and if the goal is to hurt us, we’ll get in touch with authorities and security firms to confront the people behind this,” Clem wrote.

About 13 hours later, a follow-up post on the Mint blog revealed that the Mint forums database had also been compromised.

“It was confirmed that the forums database was compromised during the attack led against us yesterday and that the attackers acquired a copy of it. If you have an account on forums.linuxmint.com, please change your password on all sensitive websites as soon as possible,” the second blog post read.

Hit the second blog post for more information on the forums database.

McAfee and the San Bernardino iPhone

Cybersecurity industry figure John McAfee has offered to crack an iPhone that belonged to one of the shooters involved in last year’s terrorist attack in the US city of San Bernardino, after Apple resisted a judge’s order to unlock the phone for investigators.

NBC News reported last week that a US federal Judge had ordered Apple to give investigators access to encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, which left 14 people dead.

“[T]he government has been unable to complete the search [of the phone] because it cannot access the iPhone’s encrypted content. Apple has the exclusive technical means which would assist the government in completing its search, but has declined to provide that assistance voluntarily,” NBC quoted the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles as saying in its argument to the court.

The presiding judge reportedly ruled that Apple had to provide “reasonable technical assistance” to the government in recovering data from the phone.

NBC later reported that Apple was opposing the court order to unlock the iPhone, and quoted Apple CEO Tim Cook as saying: “Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the US government.”

Cook reportedly said the US government had “asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone”.

“Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices,” NBC quoted Cook as saying.

Since that report, cybersecurity industry figure John McAfee has offered to decrypt the iPhone in question for the FBI.

“I work with a team of the best hackers on the planet,” McAfee wrote in an op-ed for Business Insider.

“So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America,” McAfee continued.

Mobile device management (MDM) software vendor MobileIron has also weighed in on the San Bernardino iPhone case.

According to a Reuters piece (via CRN), the organisation the shooter worked for — San Bernardino County — requires some of its workers to install MobileIron MDM software on government-issued phones.

The department the shooter worked within reportedly did not use MobileIron, however. “The app was not installed on that device,” a county spokesperson was quoted as saying.

“If that particular iPhone was using MobileIron, the county’s IT department could unlock it,” Reuters/CRN quoted MobileIron VP Ojas Rege as saying.

Telco complaints drop

New complaints made to the TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman) have dropped to the lowest level in nine years, according to the latest stats out of the organisation.

According to the stats, which cover the period of October 2015–December 2015, the TIO received 23,572 new complaints. This is the lowest number of new complaints made to the TIO since the July–September 2006 quarter.

In the latest reporting period, new complaints regarding landline services and new complaints regarding mobile services had both decreased compared to the same quarter in the previous year. However, new complaints regarding internet services had increased 11.6% from that period.

“I welcome the continuing drop in mobile and landline complaints, but internet service providers need to be on alert about internet fault complaints,” said Acting Ombudsman Diane Carmody.