Machine Museum

Andrés Freund, a Microsoft engineer, averted a global-scale cyberattack by discovering a backdoor in XZ Utils, a critical compression software used by default in almost all Linux distributions.

The programmer noticed a slowdown of just half a second in remote login processes (SSH). After a deep technical investigation, he detected malicious code hidden in the liblzma library, which was consuming unusual CPU cycles.

The perpetrator, using the pseudonym "Jia Tan," spent two years gaining the trust of the open-source community to introduce this secret access. The plan was to allow unauthorized remote control of millions of servers and devices worldwide.

Thanks to Freund's curiosity and diligence, the threat was neutralized before the infected version reached most production systems. The incident has been rated with the highest danger level on the cybersecurity scale.