The Linux Mint Blog

Our server was hacked and code was injected into it to make connections on our behalf to pinoc.org and download a trojan called JS/Tenia.d

For more information about this trojan:  http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=146254

If you visited linuxmint.com in the last two days we recommend you scan your computer to make sure this trojan isn’t present. As this attack exploited vulnerabilities within our PHP code we took the opportunity to clean it all and secure every single page against injections in the future.  Linuxmint.com is now clean and secure but we experienced almost 20 hours of downtime and we lost almost 2 days of work into fixing this.

I  personally received a lot of emails from the community, warning us about the problem. I haven’t had time to reply but I would like to thank the people who came forward. If you observe a problem in the future please do not hesitate to report it.

I’d also like to thank Michael (d00p) and Mats (husse) for the help they gave me on this. Husse, as always, catches my attention on what matters and if it wasn’t for d00p, our domain would still be  down right now. I also apologize for the downtime and for the inconvenience. Comments and questions are welcome.

* News about Mint

mintUpdate 3 released!

Even 3.2 has been released. Quite a few new features, including better proxy  support.

Distrowatch donates $400 to Linux Mint

Work is going on on the final versions (hopefully) 🙂 of  the KDE and XFCE editions. There are only a few problems left to solve, but they seem reluctant to disappear

* News about Linux

IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide An alliance has formed

IBM Contributes Key Open-Source Code for Linux Supercomputers

KDE 4 update  Any similarity in that topic with slashdot is probably no coincidence 🙂

Ubuntu goes enterprise

VMware joins Linux Foundation

Google more and more involved in Linux

Reiser4 Update

* News about IT

German hackers poke hole in great firewall of China

Hackers steal 40 million credit card numbers

‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes

Vista’s Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit

* Hardware news

AMD ditches Close-To-Metal, focuses on DX11 and OpenCL

* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

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* Editors comment

As always – if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me – you can post a comment here

Enjoy life

Husse

Linux Mint just received a donation of $400. This is the single biggest donation the project received since it was started in 2006. The donation came from Distrowatch in association with LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com.

Distrowatch is known to donate a part of its income to upstream projects and distributions on a monthly basis. This single donation of $400 makes it the second biggest Linux Mint donor.  By the past Distrowatch donated a total of $18,183 to the following projects:

* 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF – Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
* 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NdisWrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
* 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a Powerpack competition), Digikam ($408) and SabayonLinux ($450)
* 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400), FreeNAS ($350), lighttpd ($400), Damn Small Linux ($350), NimbleX ($450), MEPIS Linux ($300), Zenwalk Linux ($300)
* 2008: VLC ($350), Frugalware Linux ($340), cURL ($300), GSPCA (Linux webcam support) ($400), FileZilla ($400), MythDora ($500)

As you can see Distrowatch isn’t only one of the most popular websites about Linux, it’s also one of the biggest financial supporter of small distributions and upstream projects.  On behalf of the Linux Mint distribution I would like to thank Distrowatch, and in particular Ladislav Bodnar, for this donation and for all they’ve done for our project. Linux Mint is a successful distribution but it wouldn’t have been as popular if it wasn’t for websites like Distrowatch which allowed users to know about it in the first place. Today, we’re receiving the biggest donation since we started Mint. I feel really grateful. Thank you Distrowatch, Ladislav, and also thanks to LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com for being part of this.

Many thanks for supporting us,

Clem.