this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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[–] yesman@lemmy.world 73 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

The Checklist of infected packages

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 1 points 8 minutes ago

Well, nothing to do but start at the first one and work our way down...

[–] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 24 points 20 hours ago (8 children)

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".

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 4 points 7 hours ago

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
fi

Not sure why it uses -Qi instead of -Qm since there's no point in scanning pacman packages, but I'm no expert

[–] bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 27 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

It took Arch ~19 years just to get archinstall.

Something tells me there won't be a script.

[–] daggermoon@piefed.world 12 points 19 hours ago

The link is a script

[–] esc@piefed.social 4 points 17 hours ago

Arch had curses based installator for a long time, it became unmaintained.

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 19 hours ago

A lot of those 19 years were times where only nerds used arch.

[–] 0x0@infosec.pub 6 points 16 hours ago

You could probably find it on aur lmao

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 18 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

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

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 7 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Kjell@lemmy.world 1 points 38 minutes ago

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.

[–] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.txt

Should spit out only the packages appearing in both lists (done by memory so may not be 100%)

[–] 0x0@infosec.pub -5 points 16 hours ago

Do you have anything that will wipe their butt too?

[–] NebulaNymph@programming.dev 3 points 19 hours ago

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.

[–] shweddy@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Damn how long is the list when you

pacman -Qm
[–] Tetsuo@jlai.lu -1 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Am 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.

[–] m4ylame0wecm@lemmy.zip 7 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] shweddy@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

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

[–] gemakey@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Holy shit it's like all of Python.

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 1 points 57 minutes ago

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.

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 1 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] esc@piefed.social 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It isn't really all that unique? Debian does it, el does it, probably almost any popular distro?

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

I suppose it's become more common since PEP 668 was introduced, less unique these days.

[–] iocase@lemmy.zip 5 points 19 hours ago

The attackers specifically targeted orphaned projects on AUR so it's no wonder most of those aren't familiar to us.