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Over 400 Malicious packages found in Arch AUR

11 points by Hydrocarb0n

by Hydrocarb0n

0 subcomment

Attackers (or a coordinated set of compromised accounts) targeted many orphaned AUR packages—those without active maintainers. They pushed commits that added lines like this to the PKGBUILD (or related build files):bash
npm install atomic-lockfile ...
(Exact variations exist, but that's the core pattern.) This affects ~408 packages according to reports.
When users (or AUR helpers) build these packages with makepkg, it executes npm install, which downloads and runs the atomic-lockfile npm package. That package was published very recently and includes a preinstall script (a Rust binary at ./src/hooks/deps) that runs automatically during installation.