See, the issue is that many think "but big guys would know!" Big guys actually do not care much. People do not notice that. Such bugs (that can be exploited) a

See, the issue is that many think "but big guys would know!" Big guys actually do not care much. People do not notice that. Such bugs (that can be exploited) are inserted into the kernel very often, even from legit people and no one notices. [1] I don't blame them, but we can't _trace_ it if it's been done by an attacker. About your second link, once again, you limit yourself to attacking linux.git. Unless you crack SHA (which, is actually possible, it just looks terribly odd in the commit, and has nothing to do with flapping your arms to fly). Instead you append commits to a repository Linus pulls from for patches, and you can do it so that when Linus pulls, he gets the extra patch, and when the owner pushes, nothing happens. Heck you can even hide it from the gitweb interface. You can even do that on Linus's linux.git directly, but since zillion people look at it, its much safer to go through a branch Linus will pull from. Oh and the code isn't going to be a bind shell in the f. middle. it's going to be a dangling pointer or the like, that you know, these devs miss every other week as pointed out in [1] and bang, here's your exploit. Do you think all attackers are that retarded that they can't spend an HOUR modifying GIT for this? Keep the blind-folds on. Bonus conspiracy theory: Imagine they find such a commit, by luck or hard-work, signed off of course by someone Linus pulls from. They're going to do what? probably leave it there in a couple of month have a fix (that won't go in CVE as many of their fixes which aren't found externally). No one will be able to tell if it came from the attack (which would be a PR disaster for Linux) or not, even if uncovered.