AUR Packages Compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit

People need to get into their heads that the AUR is just a collection of user-produced PKGBUILDs.

You have to review the source of every PKGBUILD from the AUR you install, full stop. Yes that includes any updates. This really has always been the case; we've had discussion about this for well over a decade. People are always asking why there's no official AUR helper like yay - this is why.

A lot of people complain about Arch Linux being elitist, but the simple reality is it's a distro built for people who know what they are doing and don't need or want their hand held at every step of the way. This also means that if you break or compromise your own system by installing random AUR packages, it's your own damn fault.

All of that being said, the era of allowing anyone to adopt AUR packages might be coming to an end. If for no other reason then the effort of rolling back every affected package every time is too high. I'm not sure what the alternative would be, reviewing every adoption request seems like too much effort and wouldn't necessarily even help every time.

7+ hours into this and still no mention on archlinux.org webpage nor on aur.archlinux.org. Why??? AUR should have been blocked until user takes action to prove he knows about this.

Eg. change AUR API URL slightly so yay/yaourt users need to look up what is going on. New API should have infrastructure for informing users and making sure they've read the message before proceeding. Especially when they're not even sure that all malware was found.

This campaign is still ongoing. I just got an email that one of my old packages (which hasn't worked for years and was orphaned for a while) was adopted and immediately a malicious commit was pushed. They seem to be using bun instead of npm now, so any npm-based workaround likely isn't effective.

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=toggldeskto...

Obviously installing anything from AUR must be done cautiously and there have always been sketchy (as in improperly built/packaged) packages in the past but seeing actively malicious injections is concerning. I think there are two main problems with AUR: 1. it is a remnant of a slightly more egalitarian era in the open source history when you could generally trust 3rd party code and 2. orphaned packages can be adopted by anyone with their full history and vetting intact.

I think we are well past (1) but (2) could be mitigated by tighter controls on AUR accounts and potentially additional safeguards from AUR helpers. Maybe show a big scary warning if the package has changed owners recently. I know there will still be people that will "y" their way forward but it's better than nothing.

Or just avoid AUR helpers altogether and inspect/build the packages you need yourself from their PKGBUILDs directly.

There are some AUR hooks that can help. I use https://github.com/Sohimaster/traur which also has scans for orphan package takeover patterns.

I remember installing an emulator (Mednafen) on Arch Linux about a decade ago. The program failed to run because it was linked against a library my system didn't have. Turns out, the maintainer built the software on his own system and it used a library he had on his system but was not listed in the dependencies.

It is an officially maintained package and I always assumed these were built on a dedicated build server instead of some a random volunteer/home computer. Don't know if Arch still builds the same way but this event scared me enough to switch distros.

So what's a solution to this? Install packages like this in Docker containers without network access? I don't think we should assume it's limited to AUR. Every software source should be considered suspect in 2026, particularly with the adoption of vibe coding, and closed software is a bigger mess than open source because it's a black box.

Here's an easy script to scan for compromised packages:

https://cscs.pastes.sh/aurvulntest20260611.sh

Not my script. It's easy to read/parse. Never pipe a script directly to bash.

Not the first time this has happened recently. There were a few emails in the AUR list a few weeks ago about malicious packages, and a few reports on IRC too. The only difference in the campaign back then was the malicious npm package name (`linux-utils` in the campaign a few weeks ago).

More news is coming out about this:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-400-Compromised

I toyed with the idea that someone should write a binary that simply emails, or alert you when it's been run... as a canary... and call that `npm`.

At this point, not renaming the npm binary is a big risk.

Here's a commit showing how they did it: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=pass-cli&id...

Internet archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20260611213640/https://aur.archl...

I haven't used Arch for a few years now, but when I did the AUR was my favourite aspect.

It was never perfect from a security PoV, but in 2026 this kind of trust model feels increasingly scary.

third time this has happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17501379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607740

This is especially gnarly as more people have been picking up arch distros as of late (like CachyOS).

Is there a way to verify if the malware is actually installed on a machine?

Thanks for the link. It contains link to list of the affected packages, that will be useful.

Be aware of false positives! I found I had two of these packages installed, clang19 and compiler-rt19, but due to my recent laziness in updating my system, mine were still the versions from July 2025 from the official repos before they had relegated them to AUR.

You can check the build and install date with `pacman -Qi <package>`.

I run Arch Linux in a container (within Fedora Silverblue), but my plan for the future:

- consider switching away from Arch Linux for my dev container, with great sadness. A rolling distro is a terrible idea in the current security climate. I loved using Arch for my dev container exactly because of AUR.

- switch to Fedora Stable, perhaps the previous release which still gets security fixes but no other updates. I am still on Fedora 43, I guess I have no rush to update to 44. - be even lazier in updating my workstation. I used to update daily when I was running Arch, then I moved to weekly last year when I got stuck with slow internet, now consider updating monthly or more (of course, unless there are critical security bugs)

- Flatpak and Flathub terrify me, it's only a matter of time until malware appears. I have had automatic upgrades disabled for a while.

- for the love of God don't touch anything that uses npm

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48458931

Man, I never hear good security things about npm

How a person 'adopts' 408 packages and controls their build scripts?

Wow, this is effectively the end of the AUR model. There's been a malicious package or two before, but an attack this widespread shows things are fundamentally broken. Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.

AUR doesn't guarantee security, its upto the user to use AUR & verify before installing anything, its very evident why arch is not used in enterprise solutions.