Tons of clawing at each other’s throats in the comments here, largely declaring one another retarded for their use or misuse of AUR or thanking their lucky stars that none of their packages are on the list (so far), but not much that’s helpful for those less fortunate. Maybe nobody’s saying anything to that end because the article already covered it, but this is the second out of two times I’ve visited cybersecuritynews.com and been stuck in an “Are you a bot?” loop that never ends no matter how much of my browser’s safeguards I peel off.
Here’s what steps I did so far, based on following the links I found in this thread (especially the GitHub comments under one of the links):
-
pacman -Qmin console yielded a list of all the AUR packages that are installed on the system -
CTRL+F the results one-by-one in the apparent most up-to-date list: https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA
-
I have one on that list, specifically
wine-nine, so I ranbat --style header,snip,changes /var/log/pacman.log | grep wine-ninewhich yielded the following (at the bottom of a very long list of apparent updates I’ve run since installing the OS):
[2026-06-05T20:37:06-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-07T21:50:58-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-08T20:56:54-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-09T21:38:44-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-10T21:58:52-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-12T20:18:37-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-12T20:18:37-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1(Like a good little Arch user I’ve been updating pretty frequently)
- Now what?
I saw something that said “check for suspicious processes running as root” but I have no idea what that would look like.
I saw something that said I need to redo all of my passwords and tokens. Any way to check if that’s necessary or should I just assume I’ve been pwn3d?
In using
pacseekI think I’ve discoveredwine-ninehasn’t been modified in the AUR since “2024-12-07 - 15:18:31 (UTC)” so can I relax a bit? I’m currently going through my list of AUR packages and deciding whether or not I need them as badly as I originally thought. Sadly my distro is one of those that decided to lean on AUR, because most of my list (apart from two) I don’t recognize as something I’ve installed myself.
pacseekwould not let me remove the following AUR packages (which thankfully are not in the list (yet))::: removing electron41-bin breaks dependency 'electron41' required by deltachat-desktop- an encrypted chat application I installed (not via AUR) I suppose I could find an alternative for:: removing electron41-bin breaks dependency 'electron41' required by freetube- a YouTube frontend I installed (not via AUR) I suppose I could find an alternative for:: removing libsoup breaks dependency 'libsoup' required by webkit2gtk- no idea whatwebkit2gtkis
I only just now realized that chaotic-aur is probably just as problematic as AUR, both in my decision to use packages at all as well as my searching the list of compromise packages, yes? I have tons more packages under that, most of which I think came with the OS.
-
Yeah I had a mild panic before realising that I haven’t actually used aur for anything yet
I was starting to get too confident in AUR. Thankfully I wasn’t affected. Just replaced all possible AUR packages to their respective Arch and Flatpak alternatives, with exception of very few or from the ones I had no option. But will definitely check before updating them, and will only install AUR packages as a last resort.
Have a look into the Guix package manager. It works fine on top of Arch, and Guix has 31,000 packages now. Great for cross-language development and also suitable for early sharing of projects. npm support is a bit weak though, but packages written in Python, Rust, or functional languages are well represented.
Thats like nix packager, right? Looks interesting to layer on top. Says they are all reproducible builds which is nice.
Yes, Guix is initially a clone of Nix and has still remains of shared code (the build daemon).
Differences:
- Guix packages are defined in a Scheme dialect called Guile, a nice minimal functional language
- Guix was created as a GNU project and stresses the importance of free software with strong copyleft
- everything is built from source
1500+ now https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA
I think a lot of people are confusing what the AUR actually IS. It is NOT the official package repository used by Archlinux - it’s more like a bunch of community install scripts for stuff that isn’t officially supported yet - for popularity or other reasons.
So for all those people complaining and saying “debian does it better” it’s very likely that you would not even HAVE a package to install and would have to come up with a build script on your own - the AUR allows you to skip this and instead just verify that the script itself isn’t malicious, which is usually fairly obvious.
A lot of people here seem to be under the impression that all of this effort should be abstracted for them - but that’s what you chose when you left windows - a system that you control intimately with a necessitation to actually do some upkeep yourself because a giant company isn’t doing it for you.
In other words. RTFM and stop expecting other people fix all your problems for you, because that’s exactly how windows got to how it currently is.
I haven’t been on my PC that much this week, just Friday night. And our D&D group uses Discord so I needed to make sure it was up to date to ensure it would run. I typically just do a, “sudo pacman -Syu” and that seems to update what I need.
If that is the only thing I did with the PC during this window, is there any concern?
Probably not. The article says that most of it seems to have come from orphaned stuff in the AUR that the threat actors took ownership of via the legit process, then modified to pull down malicious NPM packages when someone went to install them.
So if your Discord package is well maintained you probably have nothing to worry about.
Nah, you’re fine the Discord package(https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/discord/) is in the official repo and it was not affected at all. The only people who should worry are those using AUR helpers to install packages without checking the PKGBUILD
it’s more like a bunch of community install scripts for stuff that isn’t officially supported yet - for popularity or other reasons.
I’m looking at the list of affected packages and many of them are in official debian repos. Isn’t the issue then that the official Arch repositories don’t have many packages and people have to use less secure sources? That still sounds like an Arch issue to me.
Arch actually has a large amount of official packages. Maybe some of the packages you’re referring to are just slightly renamed or alternate versions?
It’s possible that in some areas it has fewer packages of course (e.g. Debian might repackage a larger subset of PyPI as Python packages), but I need the AUR for very few things.
Isn’t the issue then that the official Arch repositories don’t have many packages …?
Not at all. The official Arch distribution has tens of thousands of packages and the user repository / AUR probably more than 100,000 .
Edit: I looked it up:
- According to distrowatch.com, the Arch Linux distribution has over 17,000 packges by now
- Meanwhile, the number of packages in the Arch User Repository is 114,000 .
Just because there is an official package doesn’t mean someone can’t make an aur one with the same name, or with common misspelling.
Been saying for years that people need to stop treating the AUR like a repo, when it’s more akin to
curl installscript.sh | bash.So, better to use a safe language, and use
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs/ | sh- right??
(I copied that from https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/ just a second ago…)
cue RuSt Is ThE fUtUrE people.
Some packages pull files from personal dropbox…
But it is a repo. It’s just an unofficial one. I don’t know how you use it without understanding this. It’s not far from perfect, but it is useful.
the problem is exactly the fact that it is a repo; it introduces a layer of unknown between the dev and the user. and the user will unavoidably “trust” it (especially when it’s listed amongst official repos in e.g. the graphical version of Pamac), without understanding the risks.
I hope all the Arch based distros will do a proper post to inform their users on how to cleanup afterwards.
I’m hoping at least cachyos, the distro I use, will tell me exactly how to check and clean my system.
I remember that when I installed a few of my AUR package, I was well aware that this repo was pretty much unregulated and that I just have to trust it’s safe. So I made sure to only use AUR as a last resort. But there was warnings on cachyos that were displayed to tell me to be cautious about it so that’s at least a positive.
The article has instructions to do exactly that.
Users who regularly install AUR packages should take the following steps immediately:
Run pacman -Qm to list all foreign (AUR) packages installed on your system and cross-reference against the published list of compromised packages
Audit recent PKGBUILD history for any packages installed between June 10–12, 2026
Rotate all credentials — browser passwords, SSH keys, API tokens, and cloud access keys — if any flagged package was installed
Scan for suspicious processes masquerading as kernel threads using tools like rkhunter or chkrootkit
Consider using AUR helpers with PKGBUILD review prompts enabled by default.
Ok, but I was expecting something a bit more automated then opening a list of package in kate and comparing it to my list of installed AUR package… Plus it’s 400 package so that’s a lot of things to check and plenty of space to miss one package by manually checking.
But I get it I’m lazy and just need to script something myself. This is affecting so many people I thought we would have a script to check quickly if you are “infected”.
Edit : thanks for the numerous script sent as reply ! But I’m all set now, thanks !
It took Arch ~19 years just to get
archinstall.Something tells me there won’t be a script.
The link is a script
A lot of those 19 years were times where only nerds used arch.
Arch had curses based installator for a long time, it became unmaintained.
It’s at the bottom of the doc:
echo "Checking for infected AUR packages (${#INFECTED_PKGS[@]} total)..." echo found=() for pkg in "${INFECTED_PKGS[@]}"; do if pacman -Qi "$pkg" &>/dev/null; then found+=("$pkg") fi done if [[ ${#found[@]} -eq 0 ]]; then echo "Clean: none of the known infected packages are installed." else echo "WARNING: ${#found[@]} infected package(s) found:" for pkg in "${found[@]}"; do echo " - $pkg" done fiNot sure why it uses -Qi instead of -Qm since there’s no point in scanning pacman packages, but I’m no expert
CachyOS community seems to have a detection script, I have not vetted this run at your own discretion.
https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/aur-compromised-400-packages-affected-20260611/31040
Here’s a script:
https://gist.github.com/Kidev/59bf9f5fb53ab5eee99f19a6a2fc3992
You could probably find it on aur lmao
how many aur packages do you have? Most people i know have like AT MOST 20 or so packages from the aur. Which takes less then 2 mins to manually check against the list.
I try to not use any, I have 6 and 4 of those are maintained by the developer, not some rando.
One I really dislike is that CachyOS when you install their gaming software bundle…it uses the AUR version of Heroic Games Launcher instead of their own repo and CachyOS does not maintain the Heroic AUR AFAIK. I guess because AUR updates more frequently than their own repo? I think it’s bad practice.
I have much more than 20 packages in aur, most of them are dependencies from steam-native-runtime. Since steam is popular, I can understand that many have more than 20 packages.
Now when I was reading the ArchWiki I saw that it is mentioned as an alternative, so I assume I can remove steam-native-runtime and all dependencies. Perhaps the instructions have been updated or I googled for instructions and found another page. But there could be other popular packages with many dependencies.
I’m not home for a few days so I can’t check yet.
But I think I have something like 3/4 packages at the most.
But I need to compare that to a 400+ list I’m not sure I agree with you it’s that easy to do rigorously.
you only need to check your 3 or 4 packages to see if they were installed/updated during a certain date range.
Considering I haven’t been home since the 6th of June, I assume I probably couldn’t have been infected. But I will still do a thorough check when I get home next week.
Not sure I understand - if you only have 3-4 packages you can just search for them specifically in the long list?
Even if you have 50 or 100s of packages, bash makes it pretty doable
comm -12 <(sort -u file1.txt) <(sort -u file2.txt) > common.txtShould spit out only the packages appearing in both lists (done by memory so may not be 100%)
Do you have anything that will wipe their butt too?
I haven’t used kate but does it not have some sort of easy search?
ex. pacman -Qm to list AUR packages; should display the 3/4 pkgs you have installed. Then just search in kate for those 3/4 results?
Alternatively cat & grep in the terminal is pretty straight forward.
That is if it’s 3/4 pkgs that are from AUR, but if someone has hundreds installed that is a bigger issue on its own.
Damn how long is the list when you
pacman -QmAm I missing something ?
Just because I have 3/4 package on my system doesn’t mean the 400+ list of affected package gets shorter on the other side…
I’m actually pretty cautious with AUR and I only install them when there is no other options.
Especially for a small list, 3-4, that you actually need to check, what’s the actual issue? Open list of 400, ctrl+f for the few names you care about, move on.
I was just curious because I didnt think it was so tediuous to check against an alphabetical list on a website using ctrl+f. But thats just me. It took me less than a minute to check my 8 aur packages against the list
Well, nothing to do but start at the first one and work our way down…
Holy shit it’s like all of Python.
Arch usually doesn’t re-package Python packages that aren’t needed for something else, meaning they end up in the AUR. I maintain several there, and when I stop using them I abandon them. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the ones I used to maintain are on the list
Yeah, Python has been a massive vulnerability for a long while. And the AUR has similar issues. This is only getting widespread coverage now. But it’s always been a risk.
Yes, we need a kind of Debian for Python.
Part of the solution could be the Guix package manager. Part could be the commercial offerings, like Anaconda.
Well, those are mostly extension libraries, stuff “normally” installed using pip. Arch is kind of unique that they encourage using system aur over pip, npm and other package managers. While it is a big radius, none of the python packages stick out to me, but maybe I just haven’t encountered the popular ones.
The attackers specifically targeted orphaned projects on AUR so it’s no wonder most of those aren’t familiar to us.
It isn’t really all that unique? Debian does it, el does it, probably almost any popular distro?
I suppose it’s become more common since PEP 668 was introduced, less unique these days.
Not even having npm installed as a system package feels like a personal win right now. I’d like to think I would have caught this due to the number of dependencies it would introduce to my system. node_modules seems like it’s been the source of most of the recent CVEs I’m hearing about.
I develop inside docker for this reason too
Pnpm for the win
Look how every motherfucker complains about arch and the aur but not that their distros blindly use it without contributing back and even suggest to blindly trust it. these same people now complain the aur is to complicated. Never go full retard guys
Wow, I have 229 AUR packages installed but none of them is on the infected list!
Am I just lucky?
i have a few machines and lots of aur packages and none of mine have a single hit either
Check again, it’s around 1500+ packages now.
How do you guys check against that list? Especially when people have so many aur packages. I simply searched the list for each package manually but I only have 5. Do you write scripts?
So far I’ve just checked the diff of every package update. But with that many, I think we should maybe start using using the script provided in the article that you evidently didn’t read.
I read another article before which did not mention the script but only listed all affected packages. So yeah I should read this article :)
typical arch user, doesn’t know how to use grep.
I have always been nervous about this type of thing happening with the AUR. Thankfully many packages I used to need the AUR for have since added native versions or made flatpaks. I hope AUR users don’t have too many issues from this!
flatpaks arn’t any safer and with how poor the sandbox is handled by 99% of devs. Hell flatpaks have a new issue every other month. Its almost more often to see a new flatpak problem then aur problem.
Its literally no safer in reality sure on paper its safer but reality has proven that flatpaks just are not some magical fix to this problem.
Hell half the time when flatpaks do have issues they go unaddressed or fixed for months after they are found. While AUR problems get smacked real fucking fast after they are found.
I haven’t heard about all of these flatpak malware incidents.
I agree that Flatpak’s utilization of sandboxing is weaker in practice than is marketed. I get that many apps ship with home/host filesystem access instead of granular permissions, but it does provide meaningful isolation when used correctly.
The one positive with flatpak is that it allows for universal deployment. A lot of projects are providing official builds. But you are still relying on them to vet what they put in.
Welp if nothing else at least this has helped me to replace jack1 with jack2 (out of my 4 total Aur packages)
So, I’m totally fine because I always manually install from the AUR? This is more of a problem for people using those AUR helpers that make a package manager out of it, right?
I don’t think it matters how you installed infected AUR packages.
No. If it came from AUR, it doesnt matter the method you used. You should check all the AUR apps you recently updated (from 9th to 12th June), and compare it to the lists. Only AUR though… Arch official repos are not affected by it.
Is this the first time AUR has been compromised to this degree?
Given how changes are often unvetted, I am surprised this hasn’t occurred before.
Is this the first time AUR has been compromised to this degree?
I do believe so, yes. There was couple of cases in last year, but never to this extend. If I understand correctly, reading arch thread, it something to do with the fact that anyone can “adopt” orphaned package on AUR. Which is kinda wild.
anyone can “adopt” orphaned package on AU
Þis is þe important point. I vet my AUR installs by checking upstream, but I don’t vet every package for every upgrade. Or, even, most. AUR could have a little more oversight wiþ relatevely little impact. E.g. a cursory initial check and þen an AUR rule preventing anyone from changing þe source repos on an existing package would make a huge difference. AUR is a centralized package list; a simple diff on
sourcepreventing inclusion in þe pkglist, and flagging þe package for review, say. Not foolproof, but it’d prevent þe most trivial exploits.Frankly, whatever problems GPG may have, AUR is a perfect use case for þe web of trust. Having maintainers have to sign packages would make exploits even harder. Not fookproof, but harder þan “effortless.”
You may or may not have commented something useful. I don’t know. Your retarded spelling right off the bat makes the whole thing moot.
it looks like youre infected…EVERYBODY STAND BACK
A lot of the AUR is just build scripts for GitHub repos …
Or dropbox
