Gnome 2.6 was scheduled for release today, Wednesday.

"We've discovered evidence of an intrusion on the server hosting www.gnome.org and other gnome.org Web sites," said Owen Taylor in a posting to the Gnome announcements mailing list. Taylor is a Gnome systems administrator, and an engineer with Linux distributor Red Hat.

"We think that the released Gnome sources and the Gnome source-code repository were unaffected. At the current time, we are cautiously hopeful that the compromise was limited in scope," he added.

By mid-morning Wednesday, the Project's FTP server was back online, and other resources, including the main Gnome Web site, had been shifted to replacement servers.

This isn't the first breach of an open-source project's servers. During 2003, several attacks were carried out on other sites, including those for Debian, Gentoo, the GNU Project, and a mirror site that contained the latest version of the Linux kernel.

Gnome 2.6 will now roll out on March 31, according to Jeff Waugh, another member of the Gnome Project. "While we have determined that none of our released sources were affected, we are showing due caution by giving the sysadmin team plenty of time to finish their investigation and restore critical services," said Waugh in a message to the project's mailing list.

Source: TechWeb News