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:
https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/minecraft-cracked/
https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/ttf-ms-fonts-all/
https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/vesktop-bin-patched/
https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/ttf-all-ms-fonts/
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).
Here is an analysis of the malicious payload: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/d9f0df8da6d66aaae024bdca26a228481049595279595e96d5ec615392430d67
And perl. And php via composer. And, soon, rust.
In the 20 lost-boys years since we lost mentors and documenters, we developed an addiction to sucking soup code continually from rando places because no one's there to challenge and ridicule us doing so. We need to stop this.
It won't stop. The use of LLMs to generate code is basically a faster way of doing exactly this, with less error checking and fewer human eyeballs actually looking at the code... and it is wildly popular with the people who make project spending decisions.