[Infowarrior] - Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

[Richard Forno]

http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2015/q2/194

Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account
From: Fyodor <fyodor () nmap org>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 00:56:23 -0700

Hi Folks!  You may have already read the recent news about Sourceforge.net
hijacking the GIMP project account to distribute adware/malware.
Previously GIMP used this Sourceforge account to distribute their Windows
installer, but they quit after Sourceforge started tricking users with fake
download buttons which lead to malware rather than GIMP.  Then Sourceforge
took over GIMP's account and began distributing a trojan installer which
tries to trick users into installing various malware and adware before
actually installing GIMP.  Of course this goes directly against Sourceforge
CEO Michael Schumacher's promise less than two years ago:

"we want to reassure you that we will NEVER bundle offers with any project
without the developers consent"
--
http://sourceforge.net/blog/advertising-bundling-community-and-criticism/

So much for that promise!  Anyway, the bad news is that Sourceforge has
also hijacked the Nmap account from me.  The old Nmap project page is now
blank:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/

Meanwhile they have moved all the Nmap content to their new page which only
they control:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/

You can see at the top that the owners of the Nmap page are now
'sf-editor1', and 'sf-editor3'.  You can click on those to see other
projects they have hijacked.

So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files (as long as
you don't click on the fake download buttons) and we haven't caught them
trojaning Nmap the way they did with GIMP.  But we certainly don't trust
them one bit!  Sourceforge is pulling the same scheme that CNet
Download.com tried back when they started circling the drain:

http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html

We will ask Sourceforge to remove the hijacked Nmap page, but more
importantly we want to reiterate that you should only download Nmap from
our official SSL Nmap site:

https://nmap.org/download.html


If you don't trust SSL by itself (and we don't blame you), you can also
check the GPG signatures: 
https://nmap.org/book/install.html#inst-integrity


Cheers,
Fyodor

PS: Ars Technica has a good article about the Sourceforge/GIMP fiasco:

http://arstechnica.com/?p=673477


PPS: Sourceforge now claims they will stop trojaning software without the
developer's permission, but they've broken that exact promise before.


--
It's better to burn out than fade away.