www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-21.html
Overview The CERT/CC has received a report that the system housing the primary FTP servers for the GNU software project was compromised. Description The 27 GNU Project, principally sponsored by the 28 Free Software Foundation (FSF), produces a variety of freely available software. The compromise is reported to have occurred in March of 2003. The FSF has released an 29 announcement describing the incident. Because this system serves as a centralized archive of popular software, the insertion of malicious code into the distributed software is a serious threat. As the above announcement indicates, however, no source code distributions are believed to have been maliciously modified at this time. Impact The potential exists for an intruder to have inserted back doors, Trojan horses, or other malicious code into the source code distributions of software housed on the compromised system. Solution We encourage sites using the GNU software obtained from the compromised system to verify the integrity of their distribution. Sites that mirror the source code are encouraged to verify the integrity of their sources. We also encourage users to inspect any and all other software that may have been downloaded from the compromised site. Note that it is not always sufficient to rely on the timestamps or file sizes when trying to determine whether or not a copy of the file has been modified. Verifying checksums The FSF has produced PGP-signed lists of known-good MD5 hashes of the software packages housed on the compromised server. As a matter of good security practice, the CERT/CC encourages users to verify, whenever possible, the integrity of downloaded software. As vendors report new information to the CERT/CC, we will update this section and note the changes in our revision history. If a particular vendor is not listed below, we have not received their comments. It is theoretically possible that downloads between March 2003 and July 2003 might have been source-compromised, so we encourage everyone to re-download sources and compare with the current copies for files on the site.
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