I have many opinions regarding this situation, but it mostly doesn't matter. AUR staff and AUR helper developers will figure out what they want to do, hopefully they will find a good approach.
But what I personally take away from this is simply that it has become worth it to target desktop Linux with malware. Or at least, moreso than previously. It is perhaps a good sign in some ways that the desktop is starting to be taken more seriously.
The bad news, of course, is that the Linux desktop is a bit of a train wreck in terms of security hygeine. It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world, and I fully expect we'll also see more malware propagated through KDE's New Stuff integration (which goes through Pling.)
A bunch of common yay commands also return back the last updated time of a package thanks to https://github.com/Jguer/yay/pull/2846.
But unless I've badly misunderstood something, the key thing that made this attack possible is this "orphaned" thing that lets you grant write access to an existing package to the first person who claims it, without any control over who that is. I don't see how this could ever be a safe thing to do, I'm not aware of any other package repository that has it, and I struggle to guess what whoever built it was thinking. If AUR just turned off that misfeature, they wouldn't be having this problem.
(The article quotes someone involved as saying that the "orphaned" feature is good because good actors can also use it, but that seems irrelevant if it also opens up an unmitigable machine-takeover vulnerability. World-writable single-namespace systems like Wikipedia work by having humans proactively checking for bad changes, and also by it not being that bad if a page is briefly defaced, since you can't push malware to users' machines that way.)
This is a good thing, because the warning about checking everything you download from the AUR, which has always existed, is now actually "enforced". People respond to consequences.
Some people (many of which don't even use Arch itself) have been treating and advertising it as something different. It's not a software distribution method meant for normal computer users.
I know that for AUR there was a specific list of affected packages (that I checked, and haven't installed any of them), but I'm interested more in a general way. It could be from AUR, npm, or many other sources. Some malware could break and lock immediately the system, but other could stay there silent for months, so how to find out if there is any?
I haven't run an antivirus since I last used Windows 20 years ago.
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/malicious-aur-checkup-script...
I do not think this something you can escape by switching distro.
An Arch maintainer that I personally know once admitted that he rarely review upstream changes when bumping package versions. He only does that when the build breaks.
I can't blame him for what he did, since it's not reasonable to ask package maintainers to spend all their time on those stuff, especially in this "Age of AI" where more and more software are being aggressively refactored (or rather rewritten) and added more features.
What we can do is choosing a stable distro (like Debian) where packages are more thoroughly reviewed, and apply security practices (such as TOTP, sandboxing browsers and video players, etc.) even though they cause inconvenience.
Mitigation Tool: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma
Blog Post with details: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...
It is so sad that every goodwill eventually got enshittified as well.
This confuses me - why would a proof-of-work anti-scraping system like Anubis prevent registrations?
Then set it in a loop on all the packages for a particular system, I don't have experience in package maintenance and would be curious what kind of issues would come up.