The OpenMandriva Linux project announced that it was the target of an attempted act of internal sabotage after a dispute among contributors.
The attempted destructive action extended from wiping GitHub repositories to pushing an empty package that could have damaged users’ systems.
OpenMandriva is an independent, community-run Linux distribution, forked from Mandriva Linux in 2012 and maintained by the OpenMandriva Association.
The distro stands out for building most of its components with the LLVM/Clang toolchain instead of GCC, which is commonly used by most Linux distributions.
According to a post on the project’s forum from long-time OpenMandriva developer and maintainer AngryPenguin, the sabotage attempt occurred after a contributor’s abusive behavior “towards certain users and members of the distribution,” which caused some of them to leave the project.
Following these events, Davide Beatrici, the leading developer of the instant messaging app Mumble and a friend of the attacker, decided to delete part of a repository the OpenMandriva team had been working on for almost a decade.
AngryPenguin stated that Beatrici had administrative privileges because he previously helped migrate and mirror project repositories to his private OneDev instance.
Apart from the data wipe, Beatrici also published an empty package in the Cooker repository that obsoleted the packages for the Gnome and Cosmic desktop environments.
The OpenMandriva team says it is currently restoring the deleted repositories and packages and is conducting a full system audit to determine any other unauthorized changes.
BleepingComputer has contacted Beatrici directly, as well as through the Mumble team, requesting his side of the story, but we have not heard back as of publishing.
However, Beatrici rejected the sabotage claims in a statement for The Lunduke Journal, saying that his goal was never to harm the OpenMandriva community or the distribution’s users.
“Let me state right away that this was by no means a ‘sabotage.’ I’m not the kind of person to do something like that,” Beatrici stated.
“The objective was not to harm the distribution I cared for and contributed to for the past 3 years. I carefully deleted all Cosmic and GNOME repositories from GitHub, the corresponding packages on Cooker (development branch) and pushed a package obsoleting them.”
As Beatrici says, this action was triggered by a few members of the project who did not agree with OpenMandriva’s focus on KDE and LXQt.
“The same members, who notably don’t care about security nor a clean Git commit history, decided to delete the “.onedev-buildspec.yml” file from several repositories without asking/informing me or anyone else first,” the developer said.
AngryPenguin stated on behalf of the OpenMandriva team that although Beatrici’s actions constitute a criminal offense, they have decided not to pursue legal action against the former contributor.
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