You may have been aware that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat Beta was supposed to be released yesterday. According to Canonical, April 4th was the Beta day. This version of Ubuntu would provide many great features, such as the updated GNOME 46 desktop, the updated kernel, and the updated installer look. However, there was something wrong with the beta release schedule.
The “xz” development team released xz 5.6.0 a month ago. If you don’t know what this program is, it’s an application and a library that allows you to compress files and streams using this compression format. It’s known for having high compression ratios, and you can even compress it the most using a parameter: –extreme (or -e for short).
However, there was something wrong with both the 5.6.0 and the 5.6.1 release of “xz” that led to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Beta not coming yesterday. There was a malicious piece of code that allowed unauthorized remote system access to other computers, but it couldn’t be found in the Git distribution; only in the full download. This started as many valgrind errors and SSH authentication taking a long time until it was discovered that the xz distribution was backdoored as in this report.
After that, several distributions, such as Red Hat and Debian, made blog posts detailing the vulnerability and the actions taken. This caused Canonical to delay the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Beta from April 4th to April 11th.
We’ll see you in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS next week!
Aptivi 
Thoughts?