August seems to be the cruelest month for Red Hat. For the second consecutive time, Red Hat has come under the attack of online hackers in the month of August. This time, partially affecting the Fedora Project.

Last August, attackers invaded five of the eight servers that hosted software for the Ubuntu Linux project.

Linux authorities have confirmed the attack and took system offline for a week. However, the hackers did not succeed in inflicting any critical damage in the system, the company claimed while officially announcing the attack and counter steps in the offing.

The Fedora Project manages the development and distribution of Red Hat's freely available version of the Linux operating system. The software created by Fedora's developers is widely used in a variety of commercial and non-commercial versions of Linux, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Quoting the red Hat announcement, Security Focus.com has reported that the most significant breach involved a system used by the Fedora Project to sign the software packages used to automatically update end users' systems.

The breach also affected the Fedora Project's database and proxy servers, hosted systems and collaboration network. A smaller number of servers used by Red Hat were affected by the breach.

Even though the damage to Fedora Project seems to be not so unimportant, Red Hat preferred to downplay the same and said that they were using the requisite outages as an opportunity to do other upgrades for the sake of functionality as well as security.

Talking at length about the security steps being taken to fix the bug, Red Hat said: ``While there is no definitive evidence that the Fedora key has been compromised, because Fedora packages are distributed via multiple third-party mirrors and repositories, we have decided to convert to new Fedora signing keys. This may require affirmative steps from every Fedora system owner or administrator. We will widely and clearly communicate any such steps to help users when available.