Over 400 Malicious packages found in Arch AUR

Hydrocarb0n 11 points 2 comments June 12, 2026
lists.archlinux.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (2 comments)

Hydrocarb0n

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.

gnabgib

Discussion (205 points, 11 hours ago, 123 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500447

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