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
This is an increasing problem and I’m not sure how the open source community is going to deal with it. It’s been a big problem with NPM packages and also Python libraries over the past five years. There’s a bunch of malicious typo-squatting stuff in many package repositories (say you want libcurl but you type libcrul, congratulations it’s probably there and it’ll probably install libcurl for you and bring a fun friend along).
Now with AI slop code getting submitted, it’s not really possible to check every new package upload. And who’s going to volunteer for that work?
Obviously, AI is going to also fix the problem 🤡
“We have investigated ourselves and found no problem.”
Wikipedia does a half decent job, we should probably adopt a model of their policies for open source code intended to be shared in such ways.