I wonder what sort of mitigations we can take to prevent such kind of attacks, wherein someone contributes to an open-source project to gain trust and to ultimately work towards making users of that software vulnerable. Besides analyzing with bigger scrutiny other people’s contributions (as the article mentioned), I don’t see what else one could do. There are many ways vulnerabilities can be introduced and a lot of them are hard to spot (especially in C with stuff like undefined behavior and lack of modern safety features) , so I don’t think “being more careful” is going to be enough.
I imagine such attacks will become more common now, and that these kind of attacks could become very appealing for governments.