Trailrunner7 wrote The attack which compromised some servers of great value belonging to kernel.org – but not the Linux kernel source code – may have been the work of hackers who simply got lucky and did not realize the value of the servers they had got hold of. The attackers made a few mistakes that allowed administrators to kernel.org to discover the violation and stop before major damage occurred. First, they used a rootkit called phalanx known Linux admins who were able to detect. And second, the attackers set up backdoors on the compromised SSH servers, including the admins also found. If hackers were specifically targeting the kernel.org servers, the attack would probably have looked quite different. A little blog in the wake of the attack agreed with the initial announcement, while it was embarrassing, the integrity of the kernel source is not in question.