It was only on August 22 that Frields was permitted to announce that, "Last week we discovered that some Fedora servers were illegally accessed. The intrusion into the servers was quickly discovered, and the servers were taken offline . . . .One of the compromised Fedora servers was a system used for signing Fedora packages. However, based on our efforts, we have high confidence that the intruder was not able to capture the passphrase used to secure the Fedora package signing key."

By contrast, the Fedora-Red Hat announcements not only concealed information, but gave users no way to investigate their own system for problems, nor any means of protection beyond the negative one of not installing or updating. Faced with a security problem, Red Hat reacted far less like Debian and much more like Microsoft, which is notorious for denying security problems until a patch is ready. No doubt it tried to protect its corporate interests, but it did next to nothing for users. When trouble came, FOSS interests and standards were apparently jettisoned in favor of immediate business concerns.