linuxmemes

I learnt a lesson yeah. It looks like I got away, there's no rootkit, I found nothing weird running, I don't have npm Installed, and up until now it doesn't seem like the packages I had installed were compromised. But I had way more AUR packages installed than I was aware of. And I was just updating them without really caring about the pkgbuild, I have better things to do. Multiple packages were outdated crap that shouldn't have been there anymore.

I was careless and took too much risk. I reduced the Installed AUR packages to a minimum, and from now on I will verify the PKGBUILDs on every update. Maybe Arch isn't really what I need. I'm on the LTS kernel and I no longer really use the AUR. But switching will be a huge hassle and this setup will work well from here on out, so I'll stick to it for now

ClamAV users, how's it going?

So what are good antivirus options for Linux? is it still pretty much just ClamAV?

I am at "no fucking yays and the bunch, check the package create/update dates, read PKGBUILD, only update when necessary". Has served me well so far

Arch users just randomly dropping "I use Arch btw" everywhere, it was only a matter of time.

And you believe that makes you safe?

Shit like this is a blemish on the Linux community.

I was on arch as a vestige from my school days, having never quite found the time to switch to something more stable. When I saw the news over the weekend, I checked and found 1 would-be-infected package on my machine that was thankfully months out of date. I'm well past the point of wanting to examine PKGBUILDs every time (hence the out of date package). But, instead of just removing AUR packages and sticking to arch repos, I decided to sweep up the technical debt by wiping and installing Fedora. I'm liking it so far, minus the absolute pain in the ass that is Nvidia on Linux. Fuck academics and their insistence on writing everything targeting CUDA; otherwise, I'd have saved a good bit of money a few years ago with a much more compatible AMD card.

The more popular Linux becomes, the less true this will be.

Use the AUR, have an antivirus, no infected packages. However I was thinking of switching to https://chimera-linux.org/ before the infected packages went out.

Custom OS that no one else has access to. It might be full of exploits and bugs, but only you would know that. 😉

My eyes, I look at AUR packages before building them, as any real arch user does. AFAIK, antivirus programs would do the same to compiled binaries, looking for suspicious things and blocking if it finds something.

Security through insecurity

Also, an ad blocker.

Hi there 👋

Don't have installed much from the AUR though.

Never trust an NPM library

Linux Users: haha those silly windows users, always searching the web for their software and getting viruses.
Linux Users: oh no I got malware by searching the AUR!

I don't use Arch, BTW. So the biggest NPM threat vector on my machine is still VSCode.

Microslop is nervous now that Linux is popular enough to attack.

btw, I use malware

With the old package managers safety was simple...trust the developers, user their packages. 10000 downloads? Easy! 1 download.... 🤔 Maybe skip for now.

Now with executables like mac and Windows it's easier to sneak something in. You still rely on trust. But now you've got AI in the game mudding the waters.

The unsandboxed package model was only ever safe in its original conception - with organizationally trusted and cryptographically enforced maintainer model. Remove the maintainer/developer trust requirement and you need a sandbox in order to prevent malware having root access on your system. Tis why mobile apps were sandboxed on Android and iOS from the get go.

Inverted security by obscurity

I avoid orphaned packages and I wait a few days before I type yay