On December 1st, 2003, we discovered that the "Savannah" system, which is maintained by the Free Software Foundation and provides CVS and development services to the GNU project and other Free Software projects, was compromised at circa November 2nd, 2003.

The compromise seems to be of the same nature as the recent attacks on Debian project servers; the attacker seemed to operate identically. However, this incident was distinctly different from the modus operandi we found in the attacks on our FTP server in August 2003. We have also confirmed that an unauthorized party gained root access and installed a root-kit ("SucKIT") on November 2nd, 2003.

In the interest of continuing cooperation and in helping to improve security for all essential Free Software infrastructure, and despite important philosophical differences, we are working closely with Debian project members to find the perpetrators and to secure essential Free Software infrastructure for the future. We hope to have future joint announcements that discuss a unified strategy for addressing these problems.

For the moment, we are installing replacement hardware for the Savannah system, and we will begin restoring the Savannah software this week. Initially, there will be some security related changes which may be inconvenient for our developers. We will try to ease these as we find secure ways to do so. We are in particular researching ways to ensure secured authentication of the source code trees stored on the system.

We will send more detailed announcements about efforts to verify the authenticity of the source code hosted on Savannah, and how the community can help in that effort once we've brought the system back online.

We hope to have at least minimal services back up by Friday 5 December 2003.