On the 16th of July, at around 8pm UTC+2, a malicious AUR package was
uploaded to the AUR. Two other malicious packages were uploaded by the
same user a few hours later. These packages were installing a script
coming from the same GitHub repository that was identified as a Remote
Access Trojan (RAT).
The affected malicious packages are:
librewolf-fix-bin
firefox-patch-bin
zen-browser-patched-bin
The Arch Linux team addressed the issue as soon as they became aware of
the situation. As of today, 18th of July, at around 6pm UTC+2, the
offending packages have been deleted from the AUR.
We strongly encourage users that may have installed one of these
packages to remove them from their system and to take the necessary
measures in order to ensure they were not compromised.
According to the gamingonlinux discord, the following packages are also suspected to be compromised:
If you have any of these packages installed, immediately delete it and check your system processes for a process called systemd-initd (this is the RAT).
This is an increasing problem and I'm not sure how the open source community is going to deal with it. It's been a big problem with NPM packages and also Python libraries over the past five years. There's a bunch of malicious typo-squatting stuff in many package repositories (say you want libcurl but you type libcrul, congratulations it's probably there and it'll probably install libcurl for you and bring a fun friend along).
Now with AI slop code getting submitted, it's not really possible to check every new package upload. And who's going to volunteer for that work?
"Warning: AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk."
I know its user produced content. But there are still rules that are enforced by Archteam and they host and link to it. And why not tell people about security issues? They could at least tell people in the news, so we can act accordingly. This is super disappointing. Is there any trustworthy RSS feed that covers this?