In brief

Hackers have tampered with the bug tracking system, mailing lists, and various Web pages housed on Linux-based servers operated by an organization that distributes its own version of the free operating system. "This is a very unfortunate incident to report about," a notice on the organization's site, www.debian.org., said a day after the incident, which occurred last November, just days before Debian was scheduled to release its latest version of Linux. "This update has been checked and it is not affected," the notice said. Still, the incident shows that no operating system is immune to security breaches.