this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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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.

Follow up

There are more packages with this malware found.

  • minecraft-cracked
  • ttf-ms-fonts-all
  • vesktop-bin-patched
  • ttf-all-ms-fonts

What to do

If you installed any of these packages, check your running processes for one named systemd-initd (this is the RAT).

The suspicious packages have a patch from this now-inaccessible Codeberg repo: https://codeberg.org/arch_lover3/browser-patch

The Arch maintainers have been informed of all this already and are investigating.

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[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 11 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Wait what happens once some government or state actor hacks rust's install script rustup with its curl | bash install procedure and relying on TLS certificates which are e.g. issued by the Russian government. (No, the rust project won't use a Russian/Chinese/US Gov certificate but your browser will trust near all of them...)

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago (5 children)

You're using that to download a program. If they can MitM the shell script, they can just as well MitM the program that you'll run right after the download...

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 6 months ago

This is why we invented hash checking. Good thing they can't MITM where that's stored! /s

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