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The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster And No One Knew

Veritasium1 HN recommenders · 2026–2026
16.4M views · documentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2026-02-25

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

Cited as an accessible, documentary-style account of the XZ backdoor in supply chain security discussions.

Security & hackingLinux & open-source ecosystemsCryptography

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4 comments from Hacker News

@nerevarthelame2026 · in “Story of XZ Backdoor [video]”

Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video [VIDEO] : > A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious. > And they also worked on Chinese New Year, but not on Christmas. And over the years, there were nine changes that fall outside of the Beijing time into UTC+2, which is a time zone that includes Israel and parts of Western Russia. That's why some experts have speculated that this could be the work of APT29, a Russian-state-backed hacker group also known as Cozy Bear. But again, do we know? No, of course we don't know who it is, and we likely will never know.

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@briansm2026 · in “The Xkcd thing, now interactive”

Just to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video: "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew" [VIDEO] (at about the 9:50 mark)

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@ajoy2026 · in “Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised”

Reminded me of a similar story at openSSH, wonderfully documented in a "Veritasium" episode , which was just fascinating to watch/listen. [VIDEO]

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@rolandog2026 · in “Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived”

Agreed. However, I often wonder if people like that are deliberately (or inadvertently) being a psyop seeking to burn out people ala how "Jia Tan" tried to become maintainer of xz [0]. [0] [VIDEO]

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