442
400+ Arch Linux AUR Packages Compromised in a Supply Chain Attack Deploying Infostealers
(cybersecuritynews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
442 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
86408 readers
2216 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
The article has instructions to do exactly that.
The Checklist of infected packages
Ok, but I was expecting something a bit more automated then opening a list of package in kate and comparing it to my list of installed AUR package... Plus it's 400 package so that's a lot of things to check and plenty of space to miss one package by manually checking.
But I get it I'm lazy and just need to script something myself. This is affecting so many people I thought we would have a script to check quickly if you are "infected".
Edit : thanks for the numerous script sent as reply ! But I'm all set now, thanks !
It took Arch ~19 years just to get
archinstall.Something tells me there won't be a script.
The link is a script
A lot of those 19 years were times where only nerds used arch.
Arch had curses based installator for a long time, it became unmaintained.
CachyOS community seems to have a detection script, I have not vetted this run at your own discretion.
https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/aur-compromised-400-packages-affected-20260611/31040
Here's a script:
https://gist.github.com/Kidev/59bf9f5fb53ab5eee99f19a6a2fc3992
You could probably find it on aur lmao
I haven't used kate but does it not have some sort of easy search?
ex. pacman -Qm to list AUR packages; should display the 3/4 pkgs you have installed. Then just search in kate for those 3/4 results?
Alternatively cat & grep in the terminal is pretty straight forward.
That is if it's 3/4 pkgs that are from AUR, but if someone has hundreds installed that is a bigger issue on its own.
Damn how long is the list when you
Am I missing something ?
Just because I have 3/4 package on my system doesn't mean the 400+ list of affected package gets shorter on the other side...
I'm actually pretty cautious with AUR and I only install them when there is no other options.
Especially for a small list, 3-4, that you actually need to check, what's the actual issue? Open list of 400, ctrl+f for the few names you care about, move on.
I was just curious because I didnt think it was so tediuous to check against an alphabetical list on a website using ctrl+f. But thats just me. It took me less than a minute to check my 8 aur packages against the list
Holy shit it's like all of Python.
Yeah, Python has been a massive vulnerability for a long while. And the AUR has similar issues. This is only getting widespread coverage now. But it's always been a risk.
Yes, we need a kind of Debian for Python.
Part of the solution could be the Guix package manager. Part could be the commercial offerings, like Anaconda.
Well, those are mostly extension libraries, stuff "normally" installed using pip. Arch is kind of unique that they encourage using system aur over pip, npm and other package managers. While it is a big radius, none of the python packages stick out to me, but maybe I just haven't encountered the popular ones.
The attackers specifically targeted orphaned projects on AUR so it's no wonder most of those aren't familiar to us.
It isn't really all that unique? Debian does it, el does it, probably almost any popular distro?
I suppose it's become more common since PEP 668 was introduced, less unique these days.
Arch usually doesn't re-package Python packages that aren't needed for something else, meaning they end up in the AUR. I maintain several there, and when I stop using them I abandon them. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the ones I used to maintain are on the list
Well, nothing to do but start at the first one and work our way down...