A Debian GNU/Linux server was compromised and was taken off line.

According to an email wrote to the members of the Debian community by Debian developer James Troup, early yesterday morning, a server located at gluck.debian.org was hacked and immediately taken offline.

Based on the results of initial investigation, Debian staff have locked down most other debian.org machines, limiting access to DSA only, until they can be fixed for what they suspect is the exploit used to compromise gluck.

“We’re still investigating exactly what happened and the extent of the damage. We’ll post more info as soon as we reasonably can”, said Troup.
In fall 2003, several Debian’s servers were also compromised in a similar fashion. Then, four of Debian’s servers were compromised that included web services, mailing lists, security downloads and common versioning system.

Debian is known as a popular Linux distribution providing powerful solution for all user categories and it’s widely used in the Linux world thanks to its easy to maintain package manager. Even though Debian official releases are geared more toward stability than cutting-edge features, it seems that there is nothing without a flaw and that cannot be braked…at least in the computer world.