A near-miss cyberattack targeting the XZ Utils, a piece of open-source software, has heightened concerns among U.S. officials and the tech industry. German software developer Andres Freund discovered unusual behavior during performance tests, uncovering a potential massive cyberattack that narrowly escaped over Easter weekend. This incident involved a secret backdoor that could have compromised countless systems, including those running on Linux, the most widely used open source OS. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has since emphasized the need for tech companies to support the open-source ecosystem more robustly, highlighting the vulnerability of the internet to such supply chain attacks. The critical role of volunteers, often unpaid individuals, in maintaining open-source software was underscored by this event. One engineer's curiosity, as noted by John Naughton, may have saved countless systems from a devastating attack. The original maintainer's burnout and a subsequent attacker's offer to help were pivotal moments leading up to the discovery of the exploit.