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Linux distribution Gentoo has had its GitHub mirror broken into and taken over, with GitHub pages changed and ebuilds replaced.

In an alert, Gentoo said the attacker gained control of the Github Gentoo organisation at June 28, 20:20 UTC.

"All Gentoo code hosted on github should for the moment be considered compromised," the alert said.

Gentoo said its own infrastructure was considered safe, and users should be OK if they rsync or webrsync from gentoo.org.

A post on the gentoo-dev list said the attacker replaced portage and musl-dev trees with ebuilds that would try to remove all the files on a user's system.

"Whilst the malicious code shouldn't work as is and GitHub has now removed the organisation, please don't use any ebuild from the GitHub mirror obtained before 28/06/2018, 18:00 GMT until new warning," Gentoo developer Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera wrote.

The distribution is yet to provide any details on how the attack happened.

Gentoo is used as a base for Google's Chrome OS.

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