411
400+ Arch Linux AUR Packages Compromised in a Supply Chain Attack Deploying Infostealers
(cybersecuritynews.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
411 points (99.8% liked)
Technology
85355 readers
3658 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, the alternative would be for moderation team to inspect them, with clear signaling of which scripts are trusted and which aren't.
But this is exactly what the top comment of Cease talks about: There is no moderation team. You seem to think that it is the job of the maintainers of the Arch Linux distribution is to vet and review the AUR packages. But they take care for the - much more widely used - Arch distro packages and are busy with this. They have enough to do. And the AUR packages are not part of the Arch distro.
The AUR is basically a server where users can store their own packages so that others can use it. As its name says: Arch User Repository.
And that's why it's fundamentally shit idea on so many levels. Instead of having one person to inspect let's make every single user expert or not to inspect every package each individually. This is fucking retardation at its finest.
There IS one person that inspect the code for everyone, that's the package maintainer. But it's a random voluntary contribution from some random person who you should not blindly trust. That's the point of the AUR, one person makes it significantly easier to install for everyone. The point is to be better than installing directly from somewhere like GitHub. For actual good moderation there are officials repos
ahahaha such a shit take
But who would do that? Do you have security expertise and are volunteering to do that?
Exactly. Let's also not forget it isn't just a matter of inspecting it once, it would be for EVERY update of the script. It would be a major bottleneck to get updates out for any package. There are comments on the AUR site where people can flag issues, so we do have some crowd sourcing, but I'd still not trust it.
The option is to not have it