The short answer to the question in my headline is probably so. Andre Freund is a software engineer for Microsoft who is located in San Francisco. His normal work is focused on database software called PostgreSQL but recently he stumbled across a backdoor placed in a piece of software which would have eventually spread around the world if he hadn’t spotted it.
The saga began earlier this year, when Mr. Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognize. He was jet-lagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory.
But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data…
