openSUSE Board Gets a New Chairman

Long-time openSUSE contributor Richard Brown is stepping down from his role as chairperson of openSUSE board, a position he had been holding for the last five years (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gerald-pfeifer-appointed-chair-opensuse-195800897.html). He will be replaced by Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE's CTO for EMEA. Gerald himself is a developer who has contributed to projects like GCC and Wine.

In a blog post, Brown said, "Some of the key factors that led me to make this step include the time required to do the job properly and the length of time I've served. Five years is more than twice as long as any of my predecessors. The time required to do the role properly has increased, and I now find it impossible to balance the demands of the role with the requirements of my primary role as a developer in SUSE, and with what I wish to achieve outside of work and community."

Brown will focus on his work at SUSE's Future Technology Team that works on emerging technologies.

"I could not be more excited and humbled to participate in the openSUSE Project as board chair," Pfeifer said. "Collaboration in the openSUSE community has contributed to remarkable Linux distributions, and I'm looking forward to ongoing growth in both the community and the openSUSE distributions – Linux and beyond – and tools. openSUSE is at the leading edge of a historic shift, as open source software is now a critical part of any thriving enterprise's core business strategy. This is an exciting time for the openSUSE community, as well as for open source at large."

The openSUSE project is funded by SUSE, but it is a community driven project where decisions are made by the community. The openSUSE distros are also upstream to many SUSE products, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE CaaSP.

Bluetooth Vulnerability Makes Spying Easy

Bluetooth is one of the weakest links that opens doors for attacks. A newly discovered vulnerability in Bluetooth enables bad actors to spy on data flowing between two devices (https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/bluetooth-knob-vulnerability.html).

According to the Hacker News, "The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-9506, resides in the way 'encryption key negotiation protocol' lets two Bluetooth BR/EDR devices choose an entropy value for encryption keys while pairing to secure their connection."

The vulnerability exposes billions of smartphones, laptops, and industrial devices.

There is nothing users can do to protect themselves at this time. According to an advisory by Carnegie Mellon University (https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/918987/), Bluetooth host and controller suppliers should refer to the Bluetooth SIG's "Expedited Errata Correction 11838" for guidance on updating their products. Downstream vendors should refer to their suppliers for updates.

Open Source Webmin had Backdoor for More Than a Year

Webmin developer's have disclosed the critical zero-day vulnerability found last week wasn't a flaw; it was planted by a hacker.

Someone planted a backdoor into the build infrastructure of Webmin, and it remained undetected through version 1.882 to 1.921.

Researcher Özkan Mustafa Akkus who discovered the vulnerability, did not inform the project about the backdoor and publicly disclosed it at DefCon (https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/webmin-vulnerability-hacking.html).

Joe Cooper, one of Webmin's developers, called it an unethical practice, giving the project no time to work on a fix to protect users.

Akkus also released a Metasploit module to exploit the vulnerability.

Webmin developers fixed the flaw by removing the backdoor. Webmin is a popular open-source web-based application for managing Unix-based systems.