Here's an easy script to scan for compromised packages:

https://cscs.pastes.sh/aurvulntest20260611.sh

Not my script. It's easy to read/parse. Never pipe a script directly to bash.

  comm -1 -2 <(pacman -Qq | sort) <(curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/quantenProjects/3f768dce7331618310f016d975bf8547/raw/beef579f8a8efeed6ccf60788e5b768775550095/packages | sort)

This is especially gnarly as more people have been picking up arch distros as of late (like CachyOS).

More news is coming out about this:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-400-Compromised

I toyed with the idea that someone should write a binary that simply emails, or alert you when it's been run... as a canary... and call that `npm`.

At this point, not renaming the npm binary is a big risk.

third time this has happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17501379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607740

Be aware of false positives! I found I had two of these packages installed, clang19 and compiler-rt19, but due to my recent laziness in updating my system, mine were still the versions from July 2025 from the official repos before they had relegated them to AUR.

You can check the build and install date with `pacman -Qi <package>`.

I run Arch Linux in a container (within Fedora Silverblue), but my plan for the future:

- consider switching away from Arch Linux for my dev container, with great sadness. A rolling distro is a terrible idea in the current security climate. I loved using Arch for my dev container exactly because of AUR.

- switch to Fedora Stable, perhaps the previous release which still gets security fixes but no other updates. I am still on Fedora 43, I guess I have no rush to update to 44. - be even lazier in updating my workstation. I used to update daily when I was running Arch, then I moved to weekly last year when I got stuck with slow internet, now consider updating monthly or more (of course, unless there are critical security bugs)

- Flatpak and Flathub terrify me, it's only a matter of time until malware appears. I have had automatic upgrades disabled for a while.

- for the love of God don't touch anything that uses npm

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48458931

I haven't used Arch for a few years now, but when I did the AUR was my favourite aspect.

It was never perfect from a security PoV, but in 2026 this kind of trust model feels increasingly scary.

Man, I never hear good security things about npm

AUR doesn't guarantee security, its upto the user to use AUR & verify before installing anything, its very evident why arch is not used in enterprise solutions.

How a person 'adopts' 408 packages and controls their build scripts?

Here's a commit showing how they did it: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=pass-cli&id...

Internet archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20260611213640/https://aur.archl...

Obviously installing anything from AUR must be done cautiously and there have always been sketchy (as in improperly built/packaged) packages in the past but seeing actively malicious injections is concerning. I think there are two main problems with AUR: 1. it is a remnant of a slightly more egalitarian era in the open source history when you could generally trust 3rd party code and 2. orphaned packages can be adopted by anyone with their full history and vetting intact.

I think we are well past (1) but (2) could be mitigated by tighter controls on AUR accounts and potentially additional safeguards from AUR helpers. Maybe show a big scary warning if the package has changed owners recently. I know there will still be people that will "y" their way forward but it's better than nothing.

Or just avoid AUR helpers altogether and inspect/build the packages you need yourself from their PKGBUILDs directly.

This campaign is still ongoing. I just got an email that one of my old packages (which hasn't worked for years and was orphaned for a while) was adopted and immediately a malicious commit was pushed. They seem to be using bun instead of npm now, so any npm-based workaround likely isn't effective.

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=toggldeskto...