On Friday, Red Hat issued a warning about a recently experienced network attack that had compromised several of its servers used by both commercially supported and free editions of the Linux operating system.

The company seemed quite confident the Red Hat Network and its update abilities had not been affected by the intrusion and told customers they were not at risk. Following the announcement, Red Hat made a script available, which can be used for detecting compromised OpenSSH (OpenBSD's Secure Shell protocol implementation) packages.

According to company officials, as the intruder had managed to sign some OpenSSH packages, updated versions of the potentially compromised packages were released. Red Hat has also put together a list of the packages and informed customers on how to detect them.

The company took advantage of the situation and besides taking care of the problems, it also managed to work on several upgrades that would help improve the system’s functionality and security.

The servers were also used by the Fedora Project; the hack affected its database, proxy servers and collaboration network. The Fedora Project handles the development and distribution of the free version of the Linux OS. Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader for Red Hat, said a very thorough investigation had been conducted and no traces of a Trojan horse had been detected.

Besides warnings its customers, Red Hat issued no other official statements with regard to the ongoing situation.