What is there to say about the hack? Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by exploiting trust relationships. I can ask him, but it is not at interesting 20 years later.
What is there to say about the [discovery]? Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by [a simple source code diff]...it is not at interesting 20 years later.
You get the idea. The story you know might be interesting to you because you happen to know the person involved. And it is sort of interesting? But not really as interesting as the _full_ story would be. In particular because your grammar in your original comment kind of implies you knew the actual attacker.
This all seems fairly obvious to me? Is there anything we're missing about the discovery? It's pretty mundane that one of hundreds of devs working on that source code happened to have a vanilla copy, especially in 2003 with a less reliable and slower internet.
A state actor would have done a much better job. This was detected nearly immediately and anyone that knew how the system was setup (which was public knowledge) would have known this would be caught. The state level hackers are not that dumb.
If there was a serious backdoor attempt, then this was the distractor.
And seriously back in those days especially Linux didn’t need much help with getting root exploits in the tree.
> Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by exploiting trust relationships
That's wrong on many levels. Bold and stupid "hacks" committed by teenagers using SE tend to get a lot of traction, because it is both bold and stupid. This hasn't changed. But "back then" there was much more than that...
