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.
Follow up
There are more packages with this malware found.
minecraft-crackedttf-ms-fonts-allvesktop-bin-patchedttf-all-ms-fonts
What to do
If you installed any of these packages, check your running processes for one named systemd-initd (this is the RAT).
The suspicious packages have a patch from this now-inaccessible Codeberg repo: https://codeberg.org/arch_lover3/browser-patch
The Arch maintainers have been informed of all this already and are investigating.
That is sound advice, the AUR is most definitely not a trusted source though. For the normal arch repos the people who put the stuff there are known, they work for the project, you’re as likely to get malware from one of those as you are to read an article bashing gamespot in gamespot, the people in charge of putting the packages there are the ones with more vested interest in things working so they won’t knowingly introduce malicious code (plus it’s a handful of people who know each other by first name).
The AUR is a different story, because anyone can put stuff there it’s very easy to have malicious code end up there. It doesn’t happen that often because most of the time it’s fairly obvious and it gets flagged straight away, plus if people start doing that people will migrate away from the AUR, so it’s a high risk low reward situation. But as more and more people start to use Arch derivatives that come with the AUR enabled without understanding any of this it becomes a more rewarding thing to exploit.
like git repositories, AUR in its name itself says what it is, a User repository. its trust like repositories is fully based on how much you trust the user who uploaded it
In fact, most PKGBUILDs just clone git repos and build them
Yeah i think the aur is pretty much completely source based, with the exception of bin packages where they pull down a precompiled binary.