Fedora reboots updates after hack

The Red Hat-supported Fedora Project has started issuing updates to its Linux distribution again, after a hiatus of several weeks caused by a hacker break-in.

US-based Red Hat, which in Australia has customers such as the National Australia Bank, warned in mid-August that hackers had broken into some of its servers that were involved with both its Red Hat Linux Enterprise offering and the Fedora Project.

Red Hat had already provided security check tools for its corporate customers, however it has taken several weeks for the Fedora Project to get back on its feet. ZDNet.com.au understands a number of smaller Australian businesses use Fedora, which is based on Red Hat code, in preference to paying support for Red Hat's corporate version of Linux.

Late yesterday, Fedora emailed its users to let them know that it would soon issue updates for its most recent Fedora 8 and 9 operating systems.

The updates were designed to switch users to a new, secure set of update servers so that they could start using a new set of encryption keys to verify downloads, wrote Red Hat engineer and Fedora project release coordinator Jesse Keating.

"Most users will simply need to apply the offered updates, and later apply any further updates, and verify/import the new [GNU Privacy Guard] key," he wrote.

The engineer said users should apply the first set of updates as soon as possible; then their systems would pick up a larger set of updates that they could download. Further steps would in future see the old encryption keys removed from use.