I wonder if a SteamDeck could somehow get infected this way...
That would surely be a rather unlikely scenario but it's interesting.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Currently you can use https://github.com/lenucksi/aur-malware-check to do a check if you're infected. My main server was safe, still haven't tested on my wayland machine though, I went yolo with that one. No important keys at least are there.
Thankfully I'm clear, but I am guilty of haphazardly installing junk from the AUR, I should clean that up and uninstall everything but the stuff I really use.
yeah when I was using Arch I was also an AUR junky. if this was happening back then I know I would have 100% been screwed.
These guys are slacking! Didn't they read the RFC for this?
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3514/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
Amateurs!
This must be fake news because several hundred people told me there is no malware on Linux.
They should have some sort of static code scanners on the repos at rest at this point that look for certain patterns and issue warnings.
Polymorphic malware is probably one of the easier things to do with LLMs, so static scanners seem of limited use.
Since this installed a malicious dependency from NPM (and later with bunjs) in the pre install script, it would need at least complex correlation to catch. Maybe building and installing all AUR packages, which would cost far too much for the Arch team.
Individually and automatically scanning only the PKGBUILDs (the stuff actually on the AUR) would likely not have caught this.
That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to run a basic scan over every change, but it wouldn't magically "fix" aur malware.
It's enough to build a pattern match and scan against it being elsewhere. Surely they did at least much to find all these packages with malware.
I wish it was that simple but I doubt there is any scanner that can differentiate between legitimate and malicious code.
Maybe an AI but even then it would probably be quite unreliable.
Unreliable is still a step up from completely absent.
Maybe. But an unreliable scanner means a human has to check all the false positives and false negatives which can quickly take a lot of time for projects that are run by benevolent devs.
It's really important to keep in mind this is done for free and that supply chain attacks like this one are very hard to identify.
I mean this is usually not the devs being careless, it's very complex attacks on projects with very limited ressources. Attackers even sometimes choose purposefully projects that are "understaffed" (well, more understaffed than others).
I don't use arch, btw.
Definitely a few unfortunate victims to stuff like libyami if using some sort of shell autocomplete. Few others would likely catch younger people, eg the implied apk side channel deployment packages.
how did this happen? the linked thread show people identifying the infected packages and cleaning them up but no word about how it happened or how to prevent it.
I think it was essentially orphaned stuff that got "picked up" by a "new maintainer" and that's how it happened.
oh I saw "clang" in the list of packages and got worried
You're only affected if you use the AUR. As far as I understand it, the core packages themselves are fine, so this is more of a MitM attack, where somebody compromised the package download streams
This is not a MitM attack.
How is it not? They didn't take over the core projects, they took over the midstream distribution.
A MitM attack defines the attack technique, not the target. It's when the target wants to connect to something but it connects through you first, and you forward while collecting/altering data.
O deer