I find it intriguing that out of all the speculative comment threads I've read so far, none of them have suggested it was Microsoft attempting to make FOSS look bad/vulnerable.
Re:Reflections on Distrusting xz
by beardedwizard on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @10:37AM
(#39918099)
How would that benefit Microsoft, who owns GitHub, the home of OSS? It's not a secret that oss is vulnerable, the opportunity for MS is to sell the solution to a captive audience.
I think if backdoor was discovered 2 or 3 months later, we maybe could understand better what they wanted to do. My speculation is that they wanted to build a massive botnet and then snoop on machines' processes and traffic looking for something. It's hard to speculate because luckily they were captured soon enough.